MBA Program Receives Top Ten Rankings for the Second Year in a Row
Tue., Oct 11, 2005
For the second consecutive year, the Isenberg School of Management’s MBA program has received two top-ten national rankings in the Princeton Review’s annual Best Business Schools publication, which ranks MBA programs in eleven strategic categories. In the current, 2006 edition—the Best 237 Business Schools—the Isenberg School’s full-time residential MBA program repeated last year’s ranking of 4th in the nation in the category, Best Professors. At the same time, it improved its national ranking in the category, Best Overall Academic Experience, from 10th to 6th.
“In the category for overall academic experience, we’re in the company of MIT, Dartmouth, Yale, Northwestern, Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley,” observes Eric Berkowitz, who is associate dean of professional programs at the Isenberg School. “We also received an extremely high admissions selectivity rating of 95 out of 99, which Princeton Review uses in rating the competitiveness of a school’s admissions.”
The overall academic experience category considered GMAT scores and undergraduate grades of enrolled students, the percentage of students accepted and enrolled, the student-faculty ratio, and student responses to survey questions about faculty, fellow students, and achievement of academic excellence. The best professors category employed student satisfaction ratings of two factors—teaching effectiveness and faculty accessibility to students outside the classroom. “Excellence in teaching and faculty accessibility are both long-standing hallmarks of the Isenberg School MBA program’s culture,” emphasizes Berkowitz.
The Isenberg School’s two-year, residential MBA program is highly selective and occupationally and internationally diverse. “During the past four years, every indicator of student quality in our residential program has risen steadily, including age, work experience, and GMAT scores,” notes Berkowitz. The same faculty who have distinguished the residential program teach in the Isenberg School’s Part-Time MBA programs, which serve 619 students both on-site in Springfield, Pittsfield, and Shrewsbury, and on-line in fifty states and twelve countries. In addition to its general curriculum, the online program offers professional MBA degrees with industry focuses on financial services and medical management.