Wharton and Chicago Booth Rank As Best Business School In The US | US News MBA Ranking

Stanford Graduate School of Business slips to third place in the latest US News MBA Ranking as the Wharton School and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business share top spot as the best business schools in the USA.

Stanford is joined in third place by Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, while Harvard and MIT Sloan share fifth place to make up the top five best US MBA programs.

US News & World Report ranks the best business schools in the USA each year based on metrics including graduate salaries and bonuses, employment rates, GMAT scores and GPAs, and MBA acceptance rates.

The US News MBA Ranking is the only major MBA ranking of 2022 so far to rank every big-name US business school. 

Best Business Schools in the USA: M7 Business Schools dominate the top 10

The six schools that make up the top five best business schools in the US are all members of the elite M7 business school club. The other member of that club, Columbia Business School, sits in eighth place in this year's ranking. The M7 are widely regarded as being among the best business schools in the world. 

Elsewhere in the top 10 are Yale School of Management in seventh place—the school's highest place to date in the US News ranking—Berkeley Haas School of Business in joint eighth place, and University of Michigan Ross School of Business in 10th. 

The success of this year's winners, Wharton and Chicago Booth, can be put down to each school's impressive overall performance at both the enrollment and graduation stage. Both school's classes boast top average GMAT scores and the highest and second highest percentage of students employed at graduation across the top 10. 

Booth's latest graduating class has an average GMAT score of 732 with an average GPA of 3.54. The average base salary of graduates is more than $150,000, and 88.7% of the latest class were employed at graduation. 

Wharton's class has an average GMAT of 733 and an average GPA of 3.6, which highlights the quality of candidate that fills the Wharton MBA classroom. Grads from the school earn an average base salary of $156,000, and 89.9% of the class were employed at graduation. 

The US News MBA ranking can be viewed as the most definitive list of the best business schools in the USA.

US News Top 10 MBA programs in the US

Graduates from third-placed Stanford earn the highest base salary among the top 10. Grads from the school earn on average $166,000 per year, with the highest earner landing a whopping base salary of $300,000. Harvard grads earn the second highest base salary among the top 10, with grads seeing on average a pay packet of $156,000 per year. 

However, Harvard's high earners can count themselves lucky they were employed at all. Among the top 10, Harvard has the lowest percentage of graduates employed at graduation, at 69%. 

When it comes to the most competitive US MBA program, Stanford sits on top. The school has an acceptance rate of just 6.2%, and is followed by MIT Sloan (12.1%) and Harvard (12.5%) in second and third, respectively. 

Read: Wharton MBA Jobs & Salary Review

US MBA programs: Gains & Losses

Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business will be disappointed to have dropped out of the top 10. The school sits in 11th place this year, followed by NYU Stern School of Business in 12th, another school to have dropped out of the top 10 in 2022. 

There are rarely seismic shifts at the top end of the US News MBA Ranking, but some lower-ranked schools made significant gains this year.

Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University climbed 27 places to 55th this year, while there were two schools that made strong gains to jump into the top 25. Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame climbed 11 places, from 36th to 25th, and Emory's Goizueta School of Business jumped five places, moving from 26th to 21st. 

There were some significant movements further down the rankings too, with this year's biggest loser in the US News list, Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business, falling 30 places, from 55th 5o 85th.

READ: How Reliable Is The US News MBA Ranking?

Best business schools for business analytics, finance & more

The US News MBA ranking also ranks business schools across several specialisms in its Specialty Rankings, although these do not contribute to the overall ranking.

According to US News, the best business schools in the USA for business analytics are MIT Sloan, Tepper School of Business, and Georgia Institute of Technology's Scheller College of Business. Harvard, Stanford, and Kellogg again rank best for best general management programs.

Babson College's Olin Graduate School of Business ranks best for entrepreneurship, and is followed by Stanford and MIT Sloan. The best US business schools for finance are Wharton, Chicago Booth, and NYU Stern. 

If you're after a career in accounting, the best business schools ranked by US News are McCombs School of Business of the University of Texas at Austin, Wharton, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Whereas if marketing is your strong point, you might want to look at Kellogg, Wharton, or Stanford, ranked the best three business schools in the US for the discipline by US News. 

Michigan State University's Eli Broad College of Business offers the best MBA for supply chain management and logistics, and if you're after a career in real estate, Wharton is your best bet.