A survey conducted by GraduatePrograms.com ranked Tuck Business School as the No. 1 Business School for Best Value for 2015.
GraduatePrograms.com offers reviews and rankings that give information to potential and current graduate school students. The website includes student perspectives on each graduate school and periodically releases the results of a survey that rank the graduate programs.
The best value ranking refers to the schools where students feel that they are receiving the best quality education for the price of their tuition, Business Insider reported. The ranking lists the top 25 graduate programs in the country.
The GraduatePrograms.com ranking is Tuck’s best in a series of rankings that have come out recenlty. The Economist ranked Tuck the number three business school. Forbes ranked the school fifth, U.S. News and World Report ranked it ninth and Bloomberg ranked it 15th in full-time business program.s
Tuck professor Vijay Govindarajan said that Tuck’s high ranking does not surprise him.
“It’s the best value,” Govindarajan said. “Ultimately, Tuck really transforms our students in very fundamental ways. Anyone who goes through the Tuck experience at the end of it their life is changed for the better. It is a phenomenal, life-changing experience, and the value gets created in three places — knowledge, experience and network.”
Over 13,000 current and recent business school students responded to the survey. These students were reached through both scholarship entries and via social media platforms, according to GraduatePrograms.com.
Graduate Programs LLC chief operating officer Harvey Berkey said that the best value ranking is only one of the categories in which students ranked their schools. Each ranking is determined entirely by students, rather than external sources.
“We are the only website that ranks schools 100 percent according to what students think of the school,” Berkey said. “We don’t use any outside rankings from any administrators or any studies or any other thing in the field. We only take information based solely and exclusively on the rankings of the students themselves.”
These individual rankings were then averaged to determine the top business schools in the country. For each category, students evaluated where their university placed on a numerical scale of one to 10, with 10 signifying a perfect ranking.
In total, students ranked their school in 15 separate categories.
“The rankings cover a whole variety of topics, such as academic competitiveness, career support and quality of network,” Berkey said.
In the best value category, students allotted Tuck an average of 9.89 points on the scale. Brigham Young University trailed slightly behind with a score of 9.83 and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill followed with 9.77 points.
The categories of ranking also included quality of education, networking and social life, each of which Tuck scored well on. Tuck was ranked No. 10 in education quality, No. 15 for networking and No. 8 for social life.
Tuck scored its lowest in the transportation category. Students gave Tuck transportation an 8.5 on the numerical scale.
The scores from the individual categories were averaged to determine the overall best business schools in the United States. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was ranked first.
Though Tuck scored fairly well in each category, it did not make the list for the top 25 business schools in the country. Berkey attributed this to both delayed student response and limited student involvement.
“A lot of Tuck’s rankings came in very late in the period,” he said. “We didn’t have a lot of rankings for Dartmouth.”
Many Tuck students were also unaware of the survey.
This was the first year Tuck made the list of rankings. In 2014, Tuck was not ranked on GraduatePrograms.com due to a lack of student submission of rankings.
“We need to have a certain minimum number of rankings before we’ll rank a school,” Berkey said. “Without being ranked, it is hard to compare Tuck to other schools.”
Because of this, Berkey urged Tuck students to complete the surveys on GraduatePrograms.com to rank their school.
“The more rankings we get for Dartmouth, the better the ratings are,” Berkey said.
Berkey also said that more students ranked Tuck following the survey’s closing on Sept. 30, so the survey does not necessarily reflect Tuck’s current ranking.
“Dartmouth’s ranking subsequent to the closing has gone up substantially,” Berkey said. “So you’re going to find that the overall rankings for the Tuck School are among the best business schools in the country [in the next survey].”
Vincent Accurso Tu’16 said that Tuck deserved its No. 1 rank. He justified this ranking by pointing toward the services Tuck offers, such as the Tuck Career Development Office.
“[The Tuck Career Development Office] is a well-oiled machine that provides great opportunities for graduating students,” Accurso said.
Edmund Shanahan Tu’17 attributed the high ranking to Tuck’s large alumni network.
“Tuck’s alumni engagement is head and shoulders above any other business school,” Shanahan said. “So I think given that our price point is about the same [as other schools] that that definitely would support the claim.”
Tuck spokesperson Anne Culp Linge declined on behalf of Tuck’s Office of Communications to comment on the rankings.
