Wharton School claims sole possession of top spot on 2025 U.S. News Best Business Schools ranking
The Wharton School once again ranks No. 1 in the U.S News MBA ranking.
Credit: Netra Mehta
The Wharton School claimed sole possession of the top spot on the 2025 U.S. News Best Business Schools ranking.
The list of full-time MBA programs, which was published on April 8, ranked 133 schools. Last year, the top spot was tied between Wharton and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Stanford dropped to second place in the 2025 ranking, tied with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
According to methodology data published by U.S. News, the U.S. News Best Business Schools rankings “compare full-time campus-based Master of Business Administration programs on their career attainment success, student excellence, and qualitative assessments by experts.”
The U.S. News approach is designed for recent college graduates interested in pursuing a traditional MBA experience. The methodology differs from others reports used to rank business programs — including college level programs, online business degree programs, and part-time MBA programs.
Half of the rankings depended on successful job attainment and projected earnings, while the other half combined academic metrics, including student achievements, recruitment, and overall program quality. Each school’s rank was determined by a score that ranked nine separate factors. This year’s ranking emphasized outcome measures while decreasing its emphasis on qualitative assessments by schools and recruiters.
Wharton last ranked No. 1 in the 2022-2023 version of the rankings, before falling to No. 3 the next year. In last year’s list, Wharton specifically placed No. 1 in executive MBA, finance, and real estate programs and No. 2 in marketing and accounting.
Wharton also placed No. 1 in the Financial Times’ 2025 list of the top 100 business schools with global MBA programs. The ranking is the second in a row that Wharton has topped the report. Columbia Business School in New York took second place on the list, followed by IESE Business School in Spain.
In 2024, Wharton was ranked No. 3 by Fortune, No. 5 by Forbes, and No. 8 by Bloomberg. Last year, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the Perelman School of Medicine withdrew their participation in the U.S. News rankings. Both schools announced that they would no longer report data, citing concerns with the methodology of the rankings. Wharton has continued to submit data to U.S. News.
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