If recent assessments by industry analysts are any indication, the stock for Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business is on the rise.
In BusinessWeek's latest edition - which will hit newsstands May 8 - magazine editors ranked the University's program third in its first-ever national list of undergraduate business schools. The rankings were released April 27.
"Students praise the school's focus on ethics and say the career services office does a great job of preparing students for business," said the magazine's Web site, BusinessWeek online.
"At No. 3 Notre Dame, rigorous classes requiring teamwork skills and an intimate knowledge of economics, calculus and corporate strategy earned the school a high grade for teaching quality," the article said. "The curriculum works ethics into most classes, requires that half of all coursework be in non-business subjects and emphasizes group projects."
In an Friday News and Information article, Dean Carolyn Woo of the College of Business said the ranking was "an achievement for the entire Notre Dame community."
"It is good to be recognized as a Catholic university with a leadership position in business, because the practice of business has such wide-ranging implications for our society and the world we live in," Woo said in the article. "The challenge for us, and for our students and alumni, is to be worthy of this responsibility."
In its student comments section, BusinessWeek online quoted one student who credited Notre Dame for "something that has been hard to measure - a sense of family."
"[The University's] Catholic character teaches its students to work ethically in the business world," the student comment said.
BusinessWeek based its rankings on five sources of data - a student survey, a recruiter survey, median starting salaries for graduates, the number of graduates admitted to top MBA programs and "an academic quality measure."
The measure consists of SAT/ACT scores of business majors, faculty-student ratios, average class size in core business classes, the percentage of majors with internships and the number of hours students spend preparing for class every week.
The average SAT and ACT scores for business majors are 1379 and 31.9, respectively, according to BusinessWeek online. The median starting salary for Mendoza graduates is $47,500. The College of Business enrolls 1,569 undergraduate students who major in four areas - accountancy, finance, management and marketing.
In the fall of 2005, Notre Dame's College of Business did not admit any external transfers. In an article in the March 3 edition of The Observer, Woo said the College of Business should not grow larger - and Assistant Dean Samuel Gaglio agreed.
"There is a pedagogical limit to the size of any class on campus," he said in the March 3 article. "It hurts the quality of the class if you go beyond that."
BusinessWeek online said to become eligible for the list, schools must offer an undergraduate business program, receive accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and "exceed cutoffs" for at least two of three criteria - "university-wide SAT and ACT scores, percentage of applicants accepted, and percentage of students coming from the top 10 percent of their high school class." The eligibility standards were implemented in order to pare down the list to "no more than 100 schools.
"BusinessWeek" ranked the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce ahead of Notre Dame in its list.
Rounding out the top five were business programs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Emory University and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Other Catholic universities in the top 25 were Georgetown (13), Villanova (19) and Boston College (23).
