CSOM Places Ninth in BusinessWeek Magazine Undergraduate Business Program Ranking

The Carroll School of Management (CSOM) ranked in the top 10 undergraduate business programs in the United States in a recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek ranking.
The school took ninth place in this year's BusinessWeek Top Undergraduate Business Programs 2010 ranking, an improvement from last year's rank of 17 in the same study. The rankings were based on student response to survey questions, post-graduation outcomes, and academic quality.

The top three spots were taken by business programs at Notre Dame, the University of Virginia, and MIT, respectively.

"The Bloomberg BusinessWeek ranking, as well as other high rankings we've received, indicate that the Carroll School is getting stronger and stronger each year," said Dean of CSOM Andy Boynton in a statement. "It's a credit to our undergraduate students, the school's superb faculty, and a dedicated staff. We're honored to be considered among the best business schools in the U.S. and among the best in the world."

Much of the study focused on student responses. Approximately 88,000 seniors at more than 140 universities received a survey that questioned the students on myriad topics, such as the quality of the teaching and the schools' facilities.

Richard Keeley, dean of undergraduate programs for CSOM, said he hopes to see some improvement in student satisfaction with the business programs. CSOM's freshman Portico seminar, he said, can help to foster a stronger relationship between CSOM students and their school.

"My hope is that there will be a ripple-through effect where each student will come out of the first year saying, ‘I want to do this,'" he said.

The responses given by corporate recruiters to survey questions were considered in the ranking. Keeley said that CSOM's focus on group organization contributes to BC's attractiveness to recruiters. "For us, it's really second nature," he said.

He also said that the quality of BC's students is an additional factor. "They pass the airplane test," he said. "The question is if you want to sit next to a BC student on an airplane. They're friendly, they have a wide variety of interests, and they're interested in who they're talking to."

CSOM enrolls approximately 2,000 students and offers six degree programs. The school also features eight research centers.

The study should be used with discretion, Keeley said. "Rankings have to be used carefully and cross-checked with personal decisions."

The ranking does not take into account the strength of specialized programs, like information systems, in each business school – a practice that Keeley said could make the ranking stronger. "They could get more precise if they can get more focused about what they were asking," he said.

This ranking comes one month after CSOM placed within the top 50 MBA programs internationally in a report by the Financial Times, a study focused on alumni salaries, international outreach, and research.

BusinessWeek did not use faculty research as a factor in its rankings.