What Are the Best Business Schools?
You are looking for a business school and you do not know where to enroll? A ranking might help. One of these rankings is from Bloomberg Businessweek. As part of their 2013 Best Undergraduate Business Schools ranking, they have now published the top 10 business schools in the area of operations management, an area that focuses on “the processes involved in production and everyday business operations, whether on an assembly line, a supply chain, or even something as common as a movie theater queue”. And these are the top 10 undergraduate business schools for operations management in the U.S.: (1) Pennsylvania (Wharton), (2) Washington (Olin), (3) Carnegie Mellon (Tepper), (4) Worcester Polytechnic, (5) Michigan (Ross), (6) North Carolina State (Poole), (7) North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler), (8) Boston U., (9) Georgia Tech (Scheller), (10) Buffalo. As I have discussed for the case of journal rankings some weeks ago, rankings always have advantages and disadvantages and should, therefore, be handled with care. However, Bloomberg Businessweek’s ranking can, at least, provide some indications.
Sorry, but these rankings are very misleading. Where are Penn State, Michigan State, Arizona State, etc….? The use of the term “operations management” is problematic as it ignores the vast majority of undergraduate programs in this field. OM is the traditional subject description, which has largely been replaced by “Supply Chain Management”, with OM as a sub-set of SCM! It would be interesting to hear what industry thinks of these schools.
Hello Mr. Barratt, thank you for drawing that to our attention. I agree with you and Andreas that such rankings are often misleading. This ranking has solely focused on the business students’ perspectives. I also assume that including other perspectives would produce results that are different. I myself studied with major concentration on OM and it turned out that OM studies are in fact very different from “Supply Chain Management” as they very much focus on business processes, math and modeling. According to my experience tracks on supply chain management are more focused on social aspects of business management.