The Goizueta Business School fell to fifth from third amongst undergraduate business programs in BusinessWeek’s annual rankings, the magazine announced Tuesday.

The ranking marks the fifth time that Emory has ranked in the top five business schools since the annual undergraduate rankings began in 2006. In 2011, the Goizueta Business School (B-School) was ranked third, up four spots from its 2010 ranking as the seventh best undergraduate business program in the nation.

“I am delighted to be listed amongst the top five once again,” Associate Dean and Director of the Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) Andrea Hershatter wrote in an email to the Wheel. “...Our overall history of strong rankings is first and foremost the end result of being part of an amazing research university like Emory that is able to lure outstanding faculty and superior students.”

BusinessWeek ranks undergraduate 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-to-student ratios, according to the BusinessWeek website.

Hershatter attributed the drop in the rankings to changes in some of the component measures. Last year, Emory’s composite ranking was four for student satisfaction and two for recruiters. This year, the student survey score remained at four while the recruiter score fell to six.

Composite rankings are created from 50 percent of surveys from the class of 2012, 25 percent from the class of 2010 and 25 percent from the class of 2009.

The B-School’s academic quality measure also dropped from seven to twelve this year. The measure is comprised of average class size, faculty-to-student ratio, average SAT score, the number of hours students report working each week and the percentage of students who report having internships.

In regard to the fall to fifth this year, Hershatter said that some of the inputs that determine the rankings are “very volatile.” She cited the recruiter survey, noting that there is a “wide degree of unpredictability that places unexpected schools higher or lower than one would imagine,” depending on which recruiters respond.

“Movement in the overall rankings, even with strong school stability, is to be expected,” Hershatter wrote.

She added that while the BusinessWeek ranking is “an important external measure of recognition,” the B-School does not let any measurement determine its strategies or practices.

“Our [education] is a process of continuous improvement; like the other degree programs at Emory, we consistently strive to do more each year to enrich the academic community,” Hershatter wrote. “Of course we hope the rankings will follow, but it is not the metric by which we measure our success.”

B-School senior Jamie Nussbaum said that although Goizueta dropped two spots this year, she is still thrilled that the school ranks among the top five in the country.

“I think the No. 3 ranking was so good that it would have been hard to beat this year,” she said. “I think being a top five business school is still a great place to be.”
While B-School junior Liz Moertel noted that it is “so exciting to still be in the top five,” she believes there are certain aspects to an undergraduate education that rankings do not touch upon.

“Experiences in a BBA program are very subjective in general,” she said. “Subjective measures such as culture — student-professor relationships and classmate relationships — cannot be captured in a ranking.”

Geoff Gloeckler, a BusinessWeek staff editor, wrote during BusinessWeek’s online chat about the rankings that this year’s top 50 schools saw a rise in average salary from about $48,000 to $50,000. He also noted that during the past seven years, schools have been “more focused on outcomes” in regard to employment.

“When we started doing these rankings, it was rare to find a school that required internships, and there wasn’t a lot of career training,” he wrote. “Now it seems like nearly every school offers these kinds of things, and from what I’ve heard, employers are noticing.”

In addition, the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business stayed ranked first and the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce remained second in this year’s rankings. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania stayed at fourth while Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management rose from fifth to third.

— Contact Jordan Friedman.