The College’s Mason School of Business was ranked as one of the best schools for marketing, according to BusinessWeek’s 2008 Undergraduate Business Program Rankings.
The school was ranked in the top ten of public U.S. business schools and 29th among all U.S. business schools for marketing, according to a press release released by the College.
“This confirms what we already knew about our faculty’s talent, commitment and personalized approach to business education,” said Dean Lawrence B. Pulley in the same press release. “It is particularly pleasing because this remarkable honor for our marketing faculty is bestowed by our students.”
Roughly one-sixth of undergraduate students at the College pursue a business major in the Mason School of Business, although, according to the School’s website, 30 percent of these students are double majors. The undergraduate business program offers concentrations in marketing, pre-business, accounting and process management, finance and consulting.
According to the website, the marketing focus “instills in students the theory and reality of consumer behavior, global marketing and marketing research.” Specifically, it strives to help students “learn about global marketing,” “improve [their] understanding of pricing policies, advertising and publicity” and “understand the psychology of consumer behavior.”
The Mason School of Business at the College is composed of the Undergraduate Business Program, Graduate Business Program and Executive Education Center.
The number-one ranked school overall was Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s famous undergraduate business program. Wharton was also ranked first in terms of macroeconomics, but it ranked only ninth for marketing. The number-two ranked school overall was University of Virginia’s McIntire school, which ranked third for marketing.
The College was ranked second for marketing behind Cornell. No other programs at the College were ranked.
To conduct its rankings, BusinessWeek surveyed over 80,000 graduating seniors from the 127 schools it ranked and received 22,905 responses, a 28 percent response rate. The publication also sent surveys to 618 corporate recruiters and received 244 responses, for a 39 percent response rate.
Furthermore, BusinessWeek compiled the median starting salary of each school’s most recent graduating class, a “feeder school” ranking from the top 35 MBA programs and an academic quality gauge which included categories such as average SAT score and the number of hours per week the students spent on schoolwork.
Of the 127 schools originally surveyed, 31 were cut due to insufficient replies on one or both surveys. For those that remained, academic quality and the survey of graduates were weighted most highly, followed by the recruiter survey, the starter salary and MBA feeder school measure.
Wharton, the top-ranked school in the survey, refused to participate, according to BusinessWeek’s article on its survey methodology. Unlike all other schools surveyed, Wharton declined to provide e-mail addresses. Using publically available information, BusinessWeek contacted 720 Wharton business majors. They received 203 surveys back, or 28 percent, exactly the national rate.
The schools were ranked in nine categories, including marketing. The other eight categories were microeconomics, quantitative methods, corporate strategy, financial management, macroeconomics, business law, accounting and operations management.