BusinessWeek ranks Wisconsin MBA No. 4 for fastest payback

In its latest biennial ranking of MBA programs, BusinessWeek rates the Wisconsin MBA program No. 4 in the nation in terms of fastest return on students’ investment. According to the magazine’s findings, students who earn an MBA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison have their costs of going back to school repaid due to higher salaries in less than five years, compared to more than 15 years for other MBA programs.

To determine the “time to payback,” the magazine looked at students’ total costs in terms of tuition, living expenses and forgone pre-MBA salaries. They then calculated how long, at their higher post-MBA salaries, it would take to offset those costs. Wisconsin’s payback time was 4.41 years, a faster payback time than almost any other school surveyed.

“We’ve long known that a degree from Wisconsin was a tremendous value,” says School of Business Dean Michael Knetter. “We are pleased that BusinessWeek’s findings confirm that.”

In the overall program ranking, BusinessWeek placed the Wisconsin MBA in a second tier of full-time MBA programs, as it has for the past eight years. Thirty programs were in the top tier and eight programs, including UW–Madison, were in the second tier. In 2004, BusinessWeek placed 20 programs in the second tier.

The BusinessWeek ranking is based on three elements: student satisfaction surveys sent to graduating MBAs, a survey of recruiters and “intellectual capital” as measured by the number of faculty articles published in top journals. BusinessWeek used a weighted average of the responses from the past three surveys in (2006, 2004 and 2002) in constructing its ranking.

“The progress our program is making in many of the rankings is encouraging,” says Knetter. “We hope we will continue to see upward movement. However, we remain focused on the fundamentals of our educational programs-recruiting the best students, delivering a superior experience and providing the best career opportunities we can, and we are seeing significant strides in those areas.”

Knetter cites results in those three areas:

• The entering class grew by 10 percent this fall and student quality, as measured by average GMAT score, is 661 for this fall’s entering class, up from 659 the previous year and considerably above the 632 average of the class entering in 2002.
• More than 85 percent of May 2006 graduates expressed satisfaction with the quality of program curriculum.
• Career placement for May 2006 graduates – the first graduating class of the newly designed Wisconsin MBA – was 95 percent within three months of graduation, up from 92 percent in 2005. Starting salaries were up 11.5 percent over the previous year.

BusinessWeek’s findings also showed progress in several measures of program quality. The most striking example was the percentage of graduates who said their Wisconsin MBA experience surpassed or vastly exceeded their expectations of what a good program should be. That percentage rose to 82.5 percent in 2006, compared to 74.4 percent in 2004 and 66 percent in 2002. (The average for schools in 2006 was 77.1 percent).

Placement outcomes for Wisconsin MBAs also showed progress. Wisconsin MBA students gave higher marks in 2006 than in previous years for the school’s role in helping students find summer internships, full-time jobs at graduation and in the caliber of firms who hire Wisconsin MBA students.