quite interesting stuff

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2011/12/05/the-most-satisfied-business-school-graduates/2/

Observations:

Interesting gauges of satisfaction: they ask students how prepared they were, their education, and their current job. Aren't there more accurate gauges? I'm thinking in real terms like salary increases and goals met.

The non-US list is just bizarre: nothing outside of western Europe (with the exception of a Canadian school,) and Cranfield on the top!

For the lazy:

The most satisfied MBAs from schools in the US:

1. Stanford
2. Darden
3. MIT Sloan
4. Booth
5. Carnegie Mellon/Tepper
6. Kellogg
7. Yale
8. Dartmouth/Tuck
9. Michigan State
10. UCLA

Non-US:
1. Cranfield
2. IE
3. IMD
4. INSEAD
5. IESE
6. LBS
7. McGill
8. Oxford
9. SDA Bocconi
10. Cambridge

Well, asking students for their subjective feelings is a supplementary factor. There's a lot of cross-cultural difference: I do think Americans are more to rate things highly (that's certainly my experience in doing international satisfaction surveys since 2003) and the expectations also pay a factor.

The FT ranking tracks 'aims achieved', which is similar. The top ten worldwide are: IMD, LBS, Tuck, HEC, SMU, Yale, Cranfield, IESE, Georgetown and Smeal.

I recently read an interview of a US army captain who graduated from the Booth MBA. Wyatt Cavalier Wyatt Cavalier now lives in London and works for financial giant Barclays. After graduating with a BA in Political Science from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2000, Wyatt joined the US Army Reserves and ever since then he has combined his military responsibilities with roles in management consulting and finance, as well as starting a couple of companies himself! He spoke about moving into finance with a background in political science and shared some of his favourite things to do in ?Chi-town? (Chicago!). Wyatt already ran a dive shop in Vietnam and a furniture company in Nevada, and he readers in on a new project he?s working on to deliver ethically sourced food items such as chocolate, wine and coffee to customers' doorsteps in the UK. He selected Booth over LBS

Interesting story about the Army captain. And regardless of how LBS and Booth rank - the post-graduation data usually shows them to be fairly competitive (at least in terms of the bottom line: salary!) Although overall growth in salary is generally better at LBS - but that has more to do with incoming salaries than exiting salaries.

Booth is a bit more expensive, so that could have something to do with satisfaction too.