UW ranks in Forbes top 10

The university’s School of Business ranked ninth in a national survey of business schools that provide the best bang for your buck.

Forbes magazine ranked 25 national business schools and 25 regional business schools according to the return on investment students can expect from attending those schools.

The overall winner? Harvard. Its grads gained the most from going back to school, notwithstanding that their costs — tuition and pre-enrollment salaries — were the highest.

Madison ranked in the top 10 among regional business schools. To calculate the worth of a university MBA, Forbes compared the salary gains it generated to the cost of getting it. The magazine started with surveys of each school’s class of 1994, asking students to disclose anonymously their compensation just before matriculating, after graduation and four and a half years later. Forbes constructed a sequence of estimated median incomes, year by year, for each school’s class of 1994. The magazine compared those numbers to what the same students would have earned without degrees, assuming that their salary growth would have been only half as fast.

Forbes’ ranking differs from the usual business-school ratings, which compare schools based on salary offers of recent graduates but take no account of the fact that schools vary widely in how much their students were making before they enrolled, as well as five years out of school.