This month, U.S. News & World Report ranked Mendoza’s Masters in Business Administration (MBA) program 23rd in the United States, a four-spot increase from last year’s ranking. The MBA program also rose to No. 6 in The Economist’s ranking of “potential to network,” another four-spot increase.
According to its website, U.S. News & World Report considers a given MBA program’s selectivity, the grades and test scores of its students and other business school administrators’ ratings of the program, as well as job placement, starting salary and bonus and company recruiters’ ratings. Notre Dame’s MBA program, which offers one- and two-year programs, tied for its No. 23 spot with Georgetown University’s McDonough School.
Patrick Perrella, director of MBA Career Development, said the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings in part reflect the program’s continuing emphasis on careers, including last year’s institution of a for-credit professional development course. He said for the last two years, the program has achieved its goals of having more than 80 percent of MBA students accept a job by the time they graduate and having more than 90 percent secure a job within three months of graduation. He said MBA graduates’ average starting salary has risen for the past three years.
“The message that we get back from recruiters about our students once they’ve gotten into their roles is that they’re willing to get their hands dirty,” Perrella said. “They’re problem-solvers. They’re not job jumpers, which I think is important, because recruiting a student costs a lot of money, so once you get them you want to keep them for a good while.
The biggest compliment they give us, though, is that most of them keep coming back to recruit our MBAs. Our MBAs are going into these firms and they’re being successful and the companies are coming back for repeat business.”
Notre Dame’s MBA program has the No. 38 spot in The Economist’s “Which MBA?” ranking, released March 6, but it is ranked no. 6 in the “potential to network” category. According to its website, the rankings, which include schools outside the U.S., consider the student-alumni ratio, the number of countries with alumni clubs and students’ own perceptions of the network. According to a University press release detailing the Economist’s ranking, Notre Dame has 267 alumni clubs in 40 countries.
“That’s one of the great things about Notre Dame,” Perrella said. “People think of us as, ‘you’re in the Notre Dame family and I want to help everyone that’s in the family,’ and I think that reflects in this ranking.
“There’s 134,000 Notre Dame alumni out there in the world, and I think that no. 6 ranking reflects the fact that when our students and our alumni reach out to folks in the Notre Dame family, they get a response, and that doesn’t happen at a lot of other schools.”
