Bloomberg Businessweek's business school rankings, released this week, put a spotlight on the cost of undertaking an MBA in the US.
Businessweek's Best Business Schools 2016 looks at both the attendance costs and wages lost during the study period in an attempt to better weigh-up whether increased salaries after graduation can justify what students give up.
In this year's ranking, Harvard Business School was placed first, despite the ranking's calculations that the 'real total cost' of undertaking the Harvard MBA was $384,000.
It seems the high rate of job placement (91.1% of graduates, 3 months post-graduation) and the salaries of graduates after 6 to 8 years (just under $300,000) could justify this cost.
Harvard was also ranked first last year.
This year Stanford Graduate School of Business was ranked second, up from 7th last year. Duke University's Fuqua School of Business was ranked third, followed by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (4th) and Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (5th) followed.
The rankings include 87 US business schools.
The full rankings, as well as an explanation of the methodology, can be found on the Businessweek website.
See more rankings on FIND MBA's Rankings page.
BusinessWeek's 2016 US MBA Rankings (top 20)
| BusinessWeek 2016 Rank | Business School | Change from 2015 |
| 1 | Harvard | - |
| 2 | Stanford | +5 |
| 3 | Duke - Fuqua | +5 |
| 4 | Chicago - Booth | -2 |
| 5 | Dartmouth - Tuck | +9 |
| 6 | Wharton | -1 |
| 7 | MIT - Sloan | -3 |
| 8 | Rice- Jones | +11 |
| 9 | Northwestern - Kellogg | -6 |
| 10 | UC Berkeley - Haas | -1 |
| 11 | Columbia | -5 |
| 12 | Virginia - Darden | - |
| 13 | Michigan - Ross | -3 |
| 14 | Yale | -3 |
| 15 | Carnegie Mellon - Tepper | +3 |
| 16 | Cornell - Johnson | - |
| 17 | NYU - Stern | +7 |
| 18 | Texas A&M - Mays | +4 |
| 19 | Washington - Foster | +1 |
| 20 | Emory - Goizueta | -5 |
Image: Student Studying by Tulane Publications CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
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