Bloomberg Businessweek's Top 13 Undergrad Business Schools

For the second year in a row, the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business beat the likes of Wharton and Stern to land at the top of Bloomberg Businessweek's list of best undergraduate business schools.

To compile their rankings, Businessweek asked approximately 28,000 students from 113 institutions to describe their experiences, as well as 246 recruiters to identify institutions that provide the best new hires and have the most innovative programs. Businessweek used these responses, as well as those from previous years, to rate the schools according to student satisfaction, post-grad starting salary, academic quality and more.

Below, check out the top 13 undergraduate schools for business. Businessweek has the full list with institutional stats, plus more on methodology.

Did your school prepare you for the business world? Weigh in on Businessweek's list in the comments section.

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University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College

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Comments

[andwhatarmy]

06:07 AM on 03/16/2011

I'm not even sure there should be such a thing as an undergraduate business college. The trouble the world is in is partly the fault of those running huge businesses having absolutely no concept of the interrelationships of nations, nor of ethics in the classical sense. These are things one learns an undergraduate in a liberal arts program. It would seem to me that spawning myriad ill-educated MBA-millionaire wannabes is precisely the problem with industrial/commercial ethics at the moment. If a person has the desire to run large businesses, then that person had better understand all the ramifications of doing so, not just the financial ones.

The busness school mindset is what has turned people into "human resources," not unlike "metal resources" or "transportation resources." "Personnel" was a bad enough term; human resources is execrable and dehumanizing in the extreme. So naturally, it wasn't far from there to testing the "human resources" skill sets. Hello! A "skill set"? Do they come in colors? Oh, they do...all the better for the ill-educated captains of industry to pigeonhole their underlings...which is all fine now that George W. Bush and the not-lamented Lehman Brothers have made the nation into virtual serfs....something that would have been far harder to do if the most recent couple of generations had been offered decent liberal educations instead of being fast-tracked into a spiritually hollow specialty when they were too innocent to know any better.

[matthewtforrest]

07:55 PM on 03/15/2011

What about Bentley or Babson?

[ricchh]

12:52 PM on 03/08/2011

Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Stanford, the four best schools in the nation, have "economics departments," and not "business" majors.

[Roybe]

08:22 AM on 03/08/2011

My suggestion to every graduating high school senior is to get a BS in Business THEN decide on a career and get your Masters in that. Why? The classes teach you to understand the longest environment you will spend your life in: work. Always seemed silly to me that a scientist, author, artist, etc. was talking budget numbers, pay, investments, etc. with someone that could and would negotiate against those interests anyway they could. BTW, if all you people advocating AGAINST an undergrad degree in business had one, I can guarantee there would have been a smaller chance of the previous mess in the financial sector occurring.

Folks remember education is power. Historically, the power in America is held by business interests. You might not like that fact, but Business Education is what opens the door for you. What you do when you step through is entirely up to you.

[Donna Davis]

08:05 AM on 03/08/2011

They forgot a little unknown Jesuit College in NJ- Saint Peters College - More CEO and CFO’s come out of St.Peters!

[ChicagoBob]

04:21 AM on 03/08/2011

What about the University of Hard Knocks, School of Experience?

Lots of people have graduated from this institution and done very well with life and business.

[don quixote12]

01:57 AM on 03/08/2011

Hell-o?? No mention of the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University?
http://kelley.iu.edu/about/urankings.html

[AbeMartin]

06:45 AM on 03/08/2011

Exactly.  Tremendous program.  Intellectually rigorous.  Excellent faculty.  Highly successful in placing students in internships and then into good jobs.  They also should have listed the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Business, which is on the bleeding, bloody edge of exploiting computing in all aspects of business.

These "rating" systems are a bunch of statistically worthless nonsense.  Check out Malcolm Gladwell's article on the fallacious methodologies employed to develop these lists in last week's New Yorker (source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell)

[sillyboy55403]

09:52 AM on 03/23/2011

Northwestern U doesn't have an undergraduate business program.

[ztck5356]

12:06 AM on 03/08/2011

Breeding grounds for more greed?

[desertman]

02:19 AM on 03/08/2011

You have a poor understanding of business. However, an MBA is probably what would really be needed.

[ztck5356]

07:34 AM on 03/08/2011

Breeding grounds for more greed.

[Charles Cho]

11:56 PM on 03/07/2011

Cornell has been great. I've been able to leverage my resources and start-up www.campusamp.com my junior year. I just launched it up last week and have over 300 users.

[desertman]

02:18 AM on 03/08/2011

Sooo... doesn't seem to be anything needing degree. Hanging out at some local bars and networking would have done that.

[Charles Cho]

08:29 AM on 03/08/2011

Somewhat true. However, it is the environment that led to the idea. I am not sure we would have thought of the idea if I wasn't in Ithaca.

Thanks

[AbeMartin]

06:46 AM on 03/08/2011

Congratulations!  I hope I have a shot at investing my $15 in your IPO.

[mapaiko]

08:37 PM on 03/07/2011

What exactly is a business school? I've got a BA in Philosophy and a JD. I never took a business class and I don't know what they actually teach you - LIFO, FIFO, rudimentary accounting? Is it a BS or a BA or does it depend where you go? Any MBA's wanna explain to me why there need be an entire school devoted to business? I only ask because I run into a lot of business school graduates - some from these very schools - in my line of work. And for the most part, they are very smart. And for the most part it seems to me they can't think beyond dollars and cents. Everything seems to be reducible to a chart or spreadsheet. Everything seems to be cost benefit analysis that begins and ends with money. I've heard there is such a thing as business ethics - one class I guess. I ask only because it appears that all these smart, motivated and ambituous people who went to college and took
"business literature" or "business psychology" or some other of the humanities and social science (always it seems geared toward business) missed an education that actually teaches critical thinking and cause and effect. I say this only because for the most part it seems like these are the very people who got us into the mess we are in today (and unfortunately with the help of not a few from my profession, yeah, "legal ethics"). Maybe we should

[ChicagoBob]

04:24 AM on 03/08/2011

Delighted to fan you for that.

[AbeMartin]

06:53 AM on 03/08/2011

I am glad you qualified your post with the final sentence.  What you say is true.  Business education is all about getting into a position that pays well or starting a business that can become very profitable.  My biggest concern is that business majors really get shorted in their exposure to great ideas.  There seems to be little interest in history, literature, music or art and as a consequence you have many millionaires who never read anything other than the WSJ, Financial News, Barron's or Forbes.

You at least, as a philosophy major, were able to explore some of the great thinking.  Even you, however, in pursuing your JD and a law degree may have decided to follow Mammon.

[Roybe]

08:53 AM on 03/08/2011

Actually, business schools generally require undergrads to attain a minimum GPA in their general course work, then apply to the school after that occurs. At the business school I attended in the UNC system, I had to carry a 3.0 GPA in all Freshman and Sophomore liberal arts courses (what you would call exposure to great ideas) before ever setting foot in the school itself, in other words, I was going to the University, but was not accepted to my major until I had sufficient exposure, and understanding, of the classic liberal arts. Pretty sure this works in most Universities with 'schools' in them. But I could be wrong on that.

[UDKM2010]

08:10 PM on 03/07/2011

Two of the top are right smack in the middle of good old Virginia. Nothing beats old money.

[Mystic01]

08:08 PM on 03/07/2011

Notice how many of these schools are named for some wealthy benefactor?

[Hell Yeah Im Uhmercan]

08:35 PM on 03/07/2011

Would you rather go to a business school that was named for some homeless guy?

[Sean Myers]

09:10 PM on 03/07/2011

are there any?

[John Crane]

08:05 PM on 03/07/2011

BYU. Not too shabby.

[CabCurious]

07:15 PM on 03/07/2011

Any how many of these graduates have any sense of history, any sense of how government actually works, any sense of sociology, any appreciation for the arts or geography or philosophy?

[CabCurious]

07:17 PM on 03/07/2011

Or science.
Or engineering.
Or math.
Or poetry.

[as81]

09:57 PM on 03/07/2011

Engineering? Financial engineering is pretty important and applicable to what you're probably calling 'engineering.' Math - Those in Logistics and Finance can rock the socks off a lot of mathy types. Poetry - They'll study some of this in marketing courses - gotta be catchy, you know. As for science - entrepreneurship is essentially the study of bringing an applied science with practical purposes to the world.

Anyway, you get the point. Business school students look at the world differently than you do. But that's ok :-)

[Megandale]

07:21 PM on 03/07/2011

I was a business major at ND, and I took all of the above...

[Panther2000]

06:53 PM on 03/07/2011

Nice to know where are America's next white collar criminals are coming from.

[desertman]

02:22 AM on 03/08/2011

lmao..