U.Va. Darden takes 9th in Bloomberg MBA program ranking

The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business tied for No. 9 out of 84 U.S. schools in the 2021-2022 Bloomberg Businessweek Best B-Schools MBA list, released this week.

The Darden School dropped from the No. 4 slot that it earned in 2019 and tied with The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania this year. Its students average GMAT score is 710, and its average class size is 338.

Bloomberg used data from schools, surveys of students who graduated from Oct. 1, 2020, through Sept. 30, 2021, alumni who graduated from Oct. 1, 2012 through Sept. 30, 2015, and employers that recruited MBA graduates for full-time positions in 2019 and 2020.

The U.Va. school received an overall score of 81.3 out of 100. In the compensation metric, Darden received an 89.9, putting the school in the 11th slot. The index measures pay right after graduation, what alumni are earning, percentage of students employed three months after graduation, percentage of class receiving a signing bonus and size of bonuses. It is the highest weighted category at 36.5%.

In the learning category, the Darden School ranked No. 13. This category focuses on whether the curriculum is applicable to real-world business situations; the degree of emphasis on innovation, problem-solving and strategic thinking; the level of support from instructors; class size; and collaboration.

The Darden School placed 14th in networking, which examines the quality of networks being built by classmates, students’ interactions with alumni, career-services office successes, quality and breadth of alumni-to-alumni interactions, and the school’s halo, or brand power, from recruiters’ viewpoints.

In entrepreneurship, the Darden School ranked No. 31. Alumni rated the quality of training that they received to start a small business or startup, and recruiters ranked schools according to graduates’ entrepreneurial skills.

This is the first year that Bloomberg Businessweek has included a diversity index. Race and ethnicity counted for 50% of the diversity score, and gender the other half. The Darden School ranked No. 54 for diversity. Its student population is 62% men and 38% women. The body is 82% white, 8% Asian, 5% Black and 6% Hispanic. The school has 38 nationalities represented total. Seventy-two percent of its students are from the U.S., 11% from India, 6% from China, 2% from Canada and 1% from South Korea.

Forty-one percent of graduates are hired in the consulting industry, 20.5% in technology and 19.1% in the financial sector.

The top 10 MBA programs on the list are:

1. Stanford Graduate School of Business
2. Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business
3. Harvard Business School
4. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
5. Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management
6. Columbia Business School
7. University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business
8. MIT Sloan School of Management
9. Tie: U.Va. Darden School of Business, The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania
10. New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business