The Goizueta Business School rose four spots to rank third amongst undergraduate business programs — the highest Emory has placed since Bloomberg BusinessWeek began its annual undergraduate rankings in 2006.

In 2010, the B-School was ranked seventh, up two spots from its 2009 ranking as the ninth best undergraduate business program in the nation.

Associate Dean and Director of the Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA)
Andrea Hershatter attributed the higher rankings not only to a stronger student ranking, but also to the higher recruiter response in the surveys.
Last year, Emory’s composite ranking was four for student satisfaction and four for recruiters. This year, the student survey number remained fourth highest in the nation, while the recruiter ranking jumped to number two in the nation. Composite rankings are created from 50 percent of surveys from the class of 2011, 25 percent from the class of 2010 and 25 percent from the class of 2009.

“We have never had a higher recruiter response in combination with a strong student survey,” Hershatter said.

BusinessWeek ranks schools based on a student survey, a recruiter survey, median starting salaries for graduates, the number of graduates admitted to 35 top Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs and academic quality of the school as measured by faculty-student ratios.

BusinessWeek’s staff editor Geoff Gloeckler, who participated in BusinessWeek’s online chat about the rankings, attributed the B-School’s ranking to a “strong student to faculty ratio” of about nine to one. He said nearly 90 percent of senior business students have had at least one business-related internship, which potentially contributed to the consistent level of student satisfaction.

Hershatter said although the four-point jump is great, it is not unprecedented.

“Given the many things that are in this control, our resources are most effectively spent building the program as opposed to satisfying the external measurement of our quality,” she said.

She said the rankings’ tendency to fluctuate makes it clear that they are based on “fairly amorphous impressions by students or corporate recruiters” and vary based on the “level of school spirit from school to school.”

— Contact Roshani Chokshi.