When choosing an undergraduate business program, there’s almost too many factors to consider. There’s cost, in-state versus out-of-state tuition, the chance of getting in, and scholarship opportunities. There’s experience and job prospects and whether or not the school offers a major a student wants to pursue.
And, then there are the rankings. Numerous rankings exist, each with its own methodology and its own results. A school that tops one list may land much lower on another. That’s why understanding how rankings are calculated is just as important as looking at where schools fall on the list.
Take U.S. News & World Report, which relies on the opinions of deans and faculty members at AACSB-accredited business schools to assess program quality. While this approach captures academic reputation, it doesn’t factor in employment outcomes, student satisfaction, or return on investment.
Niche, on the other hand, combines Department of Education data with millions of student and alumni reviews, giving weight to personal experiences – but also introducing more subjectivity into the rankings. The result? Schools like the University of Georgia’s Terry School of Business, ranked 5th by Niche, placed 33rd Poets&Quants 2025 ranking and 23rd (in a four-way tie) on the U.S. News list.
Then there are Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, which rank universities as a whole rather than evaluating business schools separately. While their lists highlight institutions with strong business programs, they don’t differentiate between business majors and other disciplines.
In other words, rankings can be a helpful tool, but they should be just one piece of the puzzle.
P&Q’S 2025 RANKING METHODOLOGY
Ranking undergraduate business schools is an inherently imperfect exercise. No single methodology captures the full picture. However, at Poets&Quants for Undergrads, we strive to rank schools based on real data that matters most to students and parents.
The best one can hope for is a ranking that strives to do better. And that’s just what we’ve done since our first ranking of undergraduate business schools in 2016. Throughout the years, we’ve consulted with deans and directors for suggestions and adjusted our approach when merited.
P&Q’s basic framework has not changed: A ranking of the top undergraduate business schools based on three equally-weighted categories – Admission Standards, Academic Experience, and Career Outcomes. Each category accounts for one third of the final ranking score. (See 2025’s ranking of the best undergraduate business programs here.)
Below are the metrics and weights included we used for the 2025 ranking.
ADMISSION STANDARDS (33.3%)
For 2025’s ranking, we made some changes to the way we calculate Admission Standards, a category that essentially tries to gauge the quality of the business students. Education, after all, is not based solely on the quality of your professors, but on the quality of your classmates as well.
First, we removed a metric measuring the percentage of students who were National Merit Scholars as high schoolers. We previously collected this metric on our alumni survey – since fewer and fewer schools collect this information – but since our threshold on the alumni survey is a 10% response rate, we realized that it is a small sample size to accurately correlate that to the entire class. Similarly, we are no longer using the alumni survey to report the metric for percent of students in the top 10% of their high school classes, and instead collected that information directly from programs in our institutional survey. We also reduced the weight to 10% of the total Admission Standards score.
Second, we added two metrics that we think will provide more reliable data provided by schools – average high school GPA (to help evaluate the quality of incoming students) and six-year graduation rate (to help evaluate the students’ success in the business program.)
Finally, we separated the diversity average (percent of women, underrepresented minorities, international students, and first-generation students) into four individual metrics, each of which will account for 5% of the overall admissions category. Previously, the average of these four metrics counted for 15% of the admissions score.
All data for the Admission Standards category is now collected directly from schools through our institutional survey, administered between July 2024 and January 2025.
Admission Standards metrics (100 possible points):
- Acceptance Rate: 25%
- Six-Year Graduation Rate: 20%
- Average high school GPA: 15%
- Average SAT/ACT (converted to SAT score): 10%
- Percent of students finishing in the Top 10% of Their High School Class: 10%
- Percentage of First-Generation College Students: 5%
- Percent Underrepresented Minorities: 5%
- Percent Women: 5%
- Percent International Students: 5%
CAREER OUTCOMES (33.3%)
One of the biggest factors for students who pursue a business degree is the jobs they can reasonably expect to get after graduation. Summer internships are also an important component to opening the door to a full-time job opportunity.
These two metrics, along with average first-year compensation for graduating seniors, are used to calculate our Career Outcomes category. Data is taken from the institutional survey as reported by the schools themselves.
We used an average of two years of career data (Class of 2023 and Class of 2024) for these metrics.
Career Outcomes metrics (100 possible points)
- Percent job-seeking students who secured full-time employment within 90 days of graduation: 50%
- Average total first year-compensation (as calculated by average salary, average signing bonus, and percent of students getting a signing bonus): 30%
- Percent of students who had business-focused internships before their senior year: 20%
ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE (33.3%)
Data for our Academic Experience category is taken straight from alumni. Who better to evaluate how well their degree prepared them for life after college?
Our 2025 alumni survey was conducted between July 2024 and January 2025. Surveys were sent to the Class of 2022 (students graduating between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022) from every school that we ranked. In total, we sent alumni surveys to 52,197 alumni from all 104 of the ranked business programs. We got 5,952 responses for a 11.4% overall response rate.
To get full credit for the data collected in the alumni survey, we require a 10% or higher response rate from alumni. We award schools their alumni data based on a sliding scale reflecting their 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, 10 schools did not meet the 10% minimum response threshold and so did not get full credit for their alumni scores. They include Florida International University, Iowa State University (Ivy), Kennesaw State University (Coles), Michigan State University (Broad), Northern Illinois University, Oregon State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Lally), San Diego State University (Fowler), University of Kansas, and University of Texas at Arlington.
That compares to seven schools who didn’t meet the response threshold in 2024 and 13 schools in 2023.
We used a weighted average of three years’ worth of alumni data in our ranking calculations, with the most recent class surveys weighted 50% and the other two class surveys weighted 25%.
Academic Experience metrics (100 possible points):
- Satisfaction average on 15 core experience questions, each rated on a one-to-ten scale: 80%.
- “Significant experience” average as defined as a major consulting project, thesis, or other program feature instrumental to their professional development, or a meaningful global immersion: 10%
- Average of students’ satisfaction with their first jobs after graduation in terms of desired company and industry, as well as their satisfaction with their current salary: 10%
DON’T MISS THESE STORIES IN OUR 2025 RANKING PACKAGE
