San Jose State or Suffolk - Sawyer - which one is the better school? I am currently working in the nonprofit field but I want to get into working at small entrepreneurial companies/startups.

I think that many start-ups are cautious about hiring fresh MBAs because of the salary (and debt-repayment) needs of MBAs. The differences might be really between the start-up scenes of San Jose and Boston. Either way, you'll need heavy networking. My feel is that San Jose is a better option. Also take a look at Shortcut to find the best US MBA www.find-mba.com/board/36065

Either way you'll probably want to do an internship with a small / medium company or startup - just so you have some experience working in a tight-knit, agile environment. Depending on what kind of organizations you have worked for, this can be a bit of an adjustment, but looks good when you go out and try to land a job in a startup.

Appreciate the advice. Let me ask you: how would Babson compare to those schools, with my career goals?

Babson has effectively marketed itself as an MBA destination for entrepreneurs, and it's true that the school does offer entrepreneurial resources. But I would be critical about how this marketing translates into real world results - ask them (and the other school) about how likely it is that you will fulfill your career goals after the MBA.

On the school's website, Babson says that 19% percent of the most recent graduating classes started their own businesses - that seems impressive, but what does that actually mean? Perhaps you can ask them to put you in touch with some graduates and get their stories.

I will contact the schools. Thanks so much for this. That's pretty amazing that 1/5 of the Babson class started businesses. Really interesting.

Just checked out Babson's alumni profile on the FT. Interesting that about 17 percent of its surveyed grads are presidents/managing directors/CEOs - compared to 0 percent for similarly-ranked schools like Smeal and UConn...

That tells me that the school is relatively successful in incubating entrepreneurs in the short term (the current data is for the class of 2012). There's no other FT-ranked US school with a comparable percentage of presidents/MDs/CEOs, except Stanford.

However, that is probably a misleading comparison, since it's entirely possible that there are some managing directors from the Stanford class of 2012 who are managing multi-million dollar startups, whereas those from Babson may be working in places which have lower profiles.