Business Schools - Rankings

For the tenth time in the past 15 years, INSEAD has captured first place in Poets&Quants‘ ranking of the best full-time MBA programs outside the U.S. This latest win in our 2024-2025 international MBA ranking follows last year’s No. 1 showing for the European school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and San Francisco.It’s an extraordinary level of achievement. In the 15 years that Poets&Quants has published its composite rankings, no school has racked up more top honors than INSEAD. The closest is Harvard Business School, which has taken over the top spot in our U.S. MBA ranking seven times.INSEAD’s 10-month Accelerated MBA program allows students to start in January or August on its France or Singapore campuses. The school takes in roughly 1,000 MBA students each year, making it the largest full-time MBA program in the world. With more than 80 different nationalities in a typical class, students enter into a truly diverse and quintessentially global experience. A recent revamping of the MBA curriculum has increased the focus on sustainability, with a real-life business simulation capstone. The program was named Poets&Quants MBA Program of the Year in 2023.

In our annual ranking of the best Online MBA Programs in the United States, we count Admission Standards as a full one-third of a school’s final score. We believe the quality of the cohort makes for a better learning environment for all students, and the more evaluation candidates are subjected to on the front end, the better the class experience at the back.A big part of a school’s Admissions score – 15 out of a possible 100 points – comes from its acceptance rate: That is the percentage of applicants who actually end up getting in. While we lowered the metric five points from last year’s ranking methodology to better measure the quality of the eventual cohort, we still believe it to be an important factor in a program’s rigor. (See the full methodology for the 2025 ranking here.)It’s not surprising, then, that the most selective schools are also among the most highly ranked – generally speaking.

For the first time since Poets&Quants began ranking full-time MBA programs in 2010, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has earned top honors on our 2024-2025 list of the best MBA programs in the U.S. Kellogg slipped past last year’s winner, Stanford Graduate School of Business, by outdistancing the West Coast giant of business education in this year’s Financial Times ranking, where the GSB shockingly slumped to a 15th-place finish, and by scoring slightly higher on student experience.Though this is Kellogg’s first time at the top, the M7 school is no stranger to winning big in MBA rankings. Kellogg has ranked first in Bloomberg Businessweek‘s rankings on five different occasions, with only one school winning more often: Stanford has sat at the top of that ranking a half dozen times. But Kellogg hasn’t sat atop a major MBA ranking since 2004 when it last came in first on Businessweek‘s list.In the Top Five this year in Poets&Quants‘ composite ranking–a mashup of the five most credible MBA rankings published this year–are third place Chicago Booth, fourth place Harvard Business School, and in fifth, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. It is Darden’s highest P&Q rank, rising from eighth last year to 14th in 2022. Rounding out the Top Ten are No. 6 Dartmouth Tuck, No. 7 Columbia Business School, No. 8 Yale School of Management, No. 9 Cornell Johnson, and finally No. 10 Duke Fuqua.

After slipping two spots last year to No. 3, University of Pennsylvania’s The Wharton School has regained the top spot in Poets&Quants’ Ranking of Best Undergraduate Business Schools.It’s a familiar spot for the Philadelphia business school. This is Wharton’s sixth time at No. 1, including a five-year streak at the top between 2018 and 2022. In our 2023 ranking, the B-school ranked No. 3 after it failed to meet the minimum response requirement on the alumni survey portion of our ranking, which accounts for a third of the final result. Wharton met the response requirement this year, helping it regain its No. 1 spot.University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business slipped one spot from last year to No. 2 while Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business fell one spot to No. 3.2024’s Top 10 best undergraduate business schools includes all the schools in 2023’s ranking except for one: Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis fell just out of the Top 10, dropping two spots to No. 11. That made way for Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business which rose one spot to No. 10.