Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania tops yet another ranking of undergraduate business programs in the United States.
No surprise at the top of Niche’s 2025 ranking for Best Colleges for Business. University of Pennsylvania, home of the venerated The Wharton School, sits at No. 1 – the same position it holds in the latest rankings of undergraduate business programs calculated by both Poets&Quants For Undergrads and U.S. News & World Report.
Niche’s second, third, and fourth best business schools aren’t big surprises either. Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business ranked third in P&Q’s 2024 ranking and tied for 13th in U.S. News’. Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management was sixth in P&Q and tied for eighth in U.S. News. USC’s Marshall School of Business was fourth and eighth in the two rankings respectively.
It’s after that Niche’s 2025 ranking gets a little more dubious.
Niche – a website catering specifically to prospective college students researching their target schools – ranked University of Georgia’s Terry School of Business as its fifth best school for business in 2025, a school that P&Q ranked 64th. U.S. News’ ranked Terry 21st – in an eight-way tie. Niche’s sixth best business school is Northeastern’s D-Amore-McKim School of Business, a school we ranked 16th and U.S. News ranked 47th.
The table below shows how Niche’s top 10 business schools stack up against the top 10 schools in P&Q’s 2024 ranking, along with how all of those were ranked by U.S. News. (We expect U.S. News to release its 2025 business school ranking within the next two weeks. Our 2025 ranking will be published in March.)
Comparison of Top B-Schools by Niche, P&Q, and U.S. News |
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2025 Niche Rank |
School |
2024 P&Q Rank |
2024 US News Rank |
| 1 | University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | Georgetown University (McDonough) | 3 | 13 (tie) |
| 3 | Cornell University (Dyson SC John) | 6 | 8 (tie) |
| 4 | University of Southern California (Marshall) | 2 | 8 (tie) |
| 5 | University of Georgia (Terry) | 64 | 21 (tie) |
| 6 | Northeastern University (D’Amore-McKim) | 16 | 47 (tie) |
| 7 | University of Michigan (Ross) | 5 | 4 |
| 8 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) | NR | 2 (tie) |
| 9 | Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) | 29 | 7 |
| 10 | Florida State University | NR | 62 (tie) |
| 11 | New York University (Stern) | 9 | 5 (tie) |
| 19 | University of Virginia (McIntire) | 4 | 12 |
| 23 | University of Notre Dame (Mendoza) | 7 | 13 (tie) |
| 32 | Georgia Institute of Technology (Scheller) | 10 | 21 (tie) |
| 45 | University of North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler) | 8 | 8 (tie) |
RANKING PROGRAMS BY STUDENT PREFERENCE
Like several prominent undergraduate rankings of U.S. colleges and universities – like Forbes’ 2025 list released earlier this week and Wall Street Journal/College Pulse’s list released on Wednesday – Niche’s main ranking list considers the whole institution. But, it also allows users to break up the ranking into dozens of areas of study – such as business and management – each with their own methodological metrics.
Those areas of study can be further broken down into specific majors. Business and management, for example, can be drilled down even further to find the best schools for finance and accounting, operations management, marketing, sports management, real estate, entrepreneurship, and more than a dozen other related majors.
Indeed, for prospective college students facing the daunting task of narrowing down their list of target schools, the Niche ranking has nearly all the others beat in one major way: The ability to rank schools by personal preference.
Is affordability most important to you? Niche lets you rank schools in your preferred price points.
Are you looking for the best community colleges for marketing? For the best large public schools for fashion and apparel merchandising? For the best schools that are moderately selective and that have diverse student populations? Niche provides rankings based on all those criteria and others.
It even shoots out a list for the best party schools. Shout out to University of California – Santa Barbara.
HOW NICHE RANKS BUSINESS PROGRAMS
The Niche Best Colleges for Business Ranking combines data from academic, financial, admissions, and student life categories, with the primary data source being the U.S. Department of Education. Millions of reviews from current students and alumni are also included to reflect personal experiences and satisfaction.
Here are the factors that contribute to the rankings, along with their relative weights:
- Overall Niche Grade (36.8%): Represents a broad view of the student experience across various categories such as academics, diversity, value, safety, campus quality, and student life.
- Percent Majoring in Business (19.1%): Proportion of undergraduate students enrolled in business majors at each school. It helps indicate how significant the business program is relative to the school’s overall student population.
- Business Program Demand (13.5%): Ratio indicating how many Niche users express interest in a particular school’s business program, compared to the actual size of the program. This factor helps show how popular and sought-after the program is.
- Business Student and Alumni Surveys (10.5%): Scores are based on a 1-5 scale, highlighting personal perspectives from those who have experienced the program firsthand.
- Business Research Expenditures per Student (7.7%): Amount of money dedicated to business research per full-time undergraduate business student, sourced from the National Science Foundation.
- Percent of U.S. Business Graduates (7.7%): Percentage of total annual U.S. business graduates that come from the program. This factor measures the impact and size of the program nationally, as reported by the U.S. Department of Education.
- Total Business Research Expenditures (4.7%): Amount spent by the school on research in business, indicating the level of investment in expanding knowledge and innovation in the field.
NEXT PAGE: Niche’s 2025 Best Colleges for Business
