BusinessWeek today released its 2008 rankings of the world’s top business schools as part of a live chat event moderated by editors Louis Lavelle, Geoff Gloeckler and Francesca Di Meglio. The chat format was designed both to build excitement around the rankings’ release and provide readers with an opportunity to ask questions about everything from the rankings methodology to the suprises the BW team encountered while compiling the list.
Kicking things off, Gloeckler began by revealing the top 10 international schools, counting down to the top spot. They were
10. Oxford (Said)
9. IESE
8. Toronto (Rotman)
7. IMD
6. ESADE
5. London Business School
4. Western Ontario
3. INSEAD
2. IE Business School
1. Queens
Queens holds the top spot in the global MBA rankings for the third consecutive year. But at number two, IE is a newcomer to the rankings. Number three INSEAD, meanwhile, advanced from the number six spot it held last year.
Lavelle then took the reins, doling out the top 30 U.S. full-time MBA programs one by one. We won’t list all 30 here – for that you can check the BW site – but we will give you the top 15. Drumroll please:
15. Indiana (Kelley)
14. UCLA (Anderson)
13. NYU (Stern)
12. Dartmouth (Tuck)
11. Cornell (Johnson)
10. UC Berkeley (Haas)
9. MIT (Sloan)
8. Duke (Fuqua)
7. Columbia
6. Stanford
5. Michigan (Ross)
4. Penn (Wharton)
3. Kellogg (Northwestern)
2. Harvard
And for the second year in a row…though sporting a new name…BW’s top-ranked U.S. MBA program is the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
As always, we encourage you to use these rankings as one of several tools for researching which MBA program promises to best fit your individual needs and goals.
While not yet live on the BW site at the time of this posting, the full rankings will no doubt be available there soon, and we will provide analysis of this year’s shifts among those jockeying for the top spots in upcoming posts. But for now, we wanted you to have the information as soon as it was released.







