The Princeton Review Releases Inaugural Online MBA Rankings

The new ranking is topped by UNC - Kenan-Flagler, IU - Kelley, and IE Business School

Test-prep firm The Princeton Review has published its first ever ranking of online MBA programs.

The Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill leads the ranking. The Princeton Review reports that the mean base salary for UNC's most recent online MBA class is $112,102.

Kenan-Flagler is followed by Indiana University at Bloomington's Kelley School of Business, which offers an online MBA program through its distance education arm, Kelley Direct. 

Spain's IE Business School, which has offered an online MBA program since 2003, takes the third spot. IE is the only non-US business school among the 25 ranked. Its Global MBA program is ranked as the number one online program globally in the 2015 edition of The Financial Times' Online MBA ranking.

In the new ranking from The Princeton Review, IE is followed by Arizona State University's Carey School of Business; Temple University's Fox School of Business rounds out the top-five.

Notably, the Thunderbird School of Global Management, which stopped running its online MBA program last year after a merger with ASU - Carey, comes in at position number eight.

(See the complete list of the top 25 schools below.)

To rank the schools, the publication graded them on five criteria: academics, selectivity, faculty, technical platforms, and career outcomes. Only MBA programs that delivered at least 75 percent of the program online were considered for the ranking.

Although this is the first time that the publication has ranked online MBA programs, The Princeton Review has been ranking undergraduate programs and other graduate programs for many years. It has published an annual ranking of business schools since 2005.

For more on MBA rankings, please see FIND MBA's Rankings page.

Here's a list of the top 25 online MBA programs ranked by The Princeton Review:

  1. UNC - Kenan-Flagler
  2. IU - Kelley
  3. IE Business School
  4. ASU - Carey
  5. Temple - Fox
  6. University of Florida - Hough Graduate School of Business
  7. Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) - Saunders College of Business
  8. Thunderbird School of Global Management
  9. The University of Texas at Dallas - Jindal School of Management
  10. Northeastern University - D'Amore-McKim School of Business
  11. James Madison University
  12. Auburn University - Auburn College of Business
  13. University of North Dakota
  14. University of North Texas (UNT) - College of Business
  15. Hofstra University - Zarb School of Business
  16. University of South Dakota - Beacom School of Business
  17. University of Nebraska - Lincoln
  18. Syracuse University - Whitman School of Management
  19. George Washington University - GW School of Business
  20. North Carolina State University - Poole College of Management
  21. University of West Georgia - Richards College of Business
  22. State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego
  23. The University of Memphis - Fogelman College of Business and Economics
  24. University of Nevada, Reno - College of Business
  25. Washington State University - College of Business

Photo credits:

  • Header: "The McColl Building - UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School" by Brisam / Creative Commons (cropped, rotated)
  • Body: The IE Business School campus in Madrid / Courtesy IE Business School

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