Wharton reclaims the top spot in our 2024 ranking of the best undergraduate business school in the U.S.
After slipping two spots last year to No. 3, University of Pennsylvania’s The Wharton School has regained the top spot in Poets&Quants’ Ranking of Best Undergraduate Business Schools.
It’s a familiar spot for the Philadelphia business school. This is Wharton’s sixth time at No. 1, including a five-year streak at the top between 2018 and 2022. In our 2023 ranking, the B-school ranked No. 3 after it failed to meet the minimum response requirement on the alumni survey portion of our ranking, which accounts for a third of the final result. Wharton met the response requirement this year, helping it regain its No. 1 spot.
University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business slipped one spot from last year to No. 2 while Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business fell one spot to No. 3.
2024’s Top 10 best undergraduate business schools includes all the schools in 2023’s ranking except for one: Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis fell just out of the Top 10, dropping two spots to No. 11. That made way for Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business which rose one spot to No. 10.
P&Q’S 10 BEST UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS SCHOOLS OF 2024
2024 Rank |
School |
Total Index Score |
2023 Rank |
YOY Change |
| 1 | University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) | 100.00 | 3 | 2 |
| 2 | University of Southern California (Marshall) | 95.84 | 1 | -1 |
| 3 | Georgetown University (McDonough) | 95.50 | 2 | -1 |
| 4 | University of Virginia (McIntire) | 94.36 | 4 | 0 |
| 5 | University of Michigan (Ross) | 93.59 | 8 | 3 |
| 6 | Cornell University (Dyson SC John) | 93.56 | 6 | 0 |
| 7 | University of Notre Dame (Mendoza) | 92.03 | 5 | -2 |
| 8 | University of North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler) | 91.38 | 10 | 2 |
| 9 | New York University (Stern) | 90.81 | 7 | -2 |
| 10 | Georgia Institute of Technology (Scheller) | 89.08 | 11 | 1 |
WHARTON’S RETURN TO THE TOP
Wharton’s No. 3 finish in our 2023 ranking followed a five-year streak at the very top. As previously mentioned, Wharton’s slip was due almost entirely to not meeting the minimum response threshold on its alumni survey. In 2023, Wharton scored higher than any other school in Admission Standards and third highest in Career Outcomes, but only 57th in Academic Experience (accounting for 33.3% of the overall ranking score) because of its alumni survey.
This year, Wharton met the response threshold and earned full credit. Averaged with its alumni results from 2022 and 2021, it ranked 30th overall in Academic Experience. It also topped both the Career Outcomes and Admission Standards categories in 2024, which together account for 66.7% of the total score.
Following Wharton, USC’s Marshall School of Business came in second in Admission Standards (compared to first in 2023), seventh in Career Outcomes (ninth in 2023), and sixth in Academic Experience (ninth in 2023).
See how each of the Top 10 schools fared in the three categories below. Then click through pages 3-5 for more detailed results for each category.
HOW THE TOP 10 B-SCHOOLS COMPARE BY CATEGORY
School |
Career Score (Rank) |
Admission Score (Rank) |
Academic Experience (Rank) |
Raw Total (Out of 300) |
| 1. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) | 100.00 (1) | 100.00 (1) | 89.43 (30) | 289.43 |
| 2. University of Southern California (Marshall) | 90.14 (7) | 90.32 (2) | 96.94 (6) | 277.40 |
| 3. Georgetown University (McDonough) | 94.71 (2) | 83.95 (4) | 97.75 (3) | 276.41 |
| 4. University of Virginia (McIntire) | 90.34 (6) | 82.76 (6) | 100.00 (1) | 273.10 |
| 5. University of Michigan (Ross) | 93.10 (3) | 80.14 (9) | 97.64 (4) | 270.88 |
| 6. Cornell University (Dyson SC John) | 91.27 (5) | 84.12 (2) | 95.4 (12) | 270.79 |
| 7. University of Notre Dame (Mendoza) | 87.42 (11) | 83.11 (5) | 95.82 (10) | 266.36 |
| 8. University of North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler) | 88.79 (10) | 78.76 (11) | 96.93 (7) | 264.48 |
| 9. New York University (Stern) | 89.69 (9) | 80.36 (7) | 92.8 (18) | 262.84 |
| 10. Georgia Institute of Technology (Scheller) | 81.66 (25) | 79.01 (10) | 97.16 (5) | 257.83 |
AN UPDATED METHODOLOGY FOR 2024
Ninety-one schools participated in 2024’s ranking, including two schools that have not been previously ranked: Loyola Marymount University which debuted at No. 39 and Roger Williams University’s Mario J. Gabelli School of Business which debuted at No. 79.
P&Q’s undergraduate business school ranking is based on three categories we believe best measure the undergrad B-school experience: the quality and diversity of students enrolling in a program (Admissions Standards); the ability of a B-school to nurture, challenge, and grow those young minds (Academic Experience); and how the market and world’s top employers respond to those graduates when leaving the school (Career Outcomes). Each category is given an equal weight in the final score of 33.3%.
Within each of those categories, we look at a number of metrics with varying weights of importance. Through the years, we’ve adjusted metrics and weights based on school feedback and changes in admission practices, but we made no major changes this year. The only difference in methodology from 2023’s ranking is we considered three years of alumni data instead of two.
Admissions and career data is mostly gathered through our institutional survey that each school completed between July and December of 2023. However, two admission metrics are collected through our alumni survey because fewer and fewer schools collect the data themselves: Percent of alumni who were National Merit Scholar finalists or semifinalists, and the percent of alumni who finished in the top 10% of their high school classes.
Like the previous two years, only 10% of weight within the admissions category was given to average SAT scores while acceptance rate was given a weight of 30%. Last year, we stopped using the average high school GPA of the latest enrolling class based on feedback from school administrators and deans and replaced it with diversity data from the entering class. We did the same this year, giving the diversity metric a weight of 15%.
Academic Experience data comes entirely from the alumni survey, also administered between June and December of 2023. This year we surveyed students from the Class of 2021, or those graduating between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.
The main difference in this year’s methodology is we included three years’ worth of alumni data (this year and the previous two years). We included two years worth of alumni data in 2023, and the previous six years we only included one year’s worth. We found that alumni surveys can vary wildly year to year if a single class of graduates was happy or unhappy. While there are still swings from the alumni survey, averaging three years of alumni response data helps cut down on the most dramatic swings.
To get full credit for the data collected in the alumni survey, we require a 10% or higher response rate from the surveyed class. We award schools their alumni data based on a sliding scale reflecting their alumni response rates. For example, a 10% or higher response rate earns 100% of alumni data, a 9.43% response rate earns 94.3% of the total alumni data, and so on.
This year, seven schools did not meet the 10% minimum response threshold and so did not get full credit for their alumni scores. That compares to 13 schools who didn’t meet the response threshold in 2023. (See the full explanation of our 2024 ranking methodology here.)
NEXT PAGE: 2024’s biggest risers and fallers
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