Forbes ranks top B-Schools(2007) on ROI criteria

In its 2007 rankings of the top Business Schools of the world, Forbes has gone in for the 'Return on Investment'* criteria to rank the best B-Schools across the globe. (though the sample used for this is not from the immediate past batches, which raises a question mark over the current validity of the results - however, the rankings can be a good indicator of the top B-Schools. Word of warning: Should you see some very surprising results, do take a second opinion. Do i see you running to the FT rankings already!!)

Here are the FORBES B-School Rankings for 2007.

Forbes Top 10 US B-schools 2007:
Rank 1. Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth 2. Stanford 3. Harvard 4. Virginia (Darden) 5. Pennsylvania (Wharton) 6. Columbia 7. Chicago 8. Yale 9. Northwestern (Kellogg) 10. Cornell (Johnson)

Forbes Top Non-US One-Year Business Schools 2007:
Rank 1. IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland 2. Insead, Fountainbleau, France 3. Judge Business School, University ofCambridge, UK 4. Instituto de Empresa, Madrid, Spain 5. Cranfield, Bedford, UK

Forbes Top Non-US Two-Year Business Schools 2007

Rank 1. Australian Graduate School of Management 2. British Columbia (Sauder), Canada

3. Esade, Spain 4. Ceibs, China 5. McGill, Canada

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Related Posts:

1. US Top B-School Rankings

2. UK Top B-School Rankings

3. India's Top B-School Rankings

4. India's Top B-School Rankings Part 2

*What is Return on Investment?

- ROI is return on invested capital. While using this criteria for b-school rankings, a simple way of going about it would be to weigh the average placement salaries against the tution fees or the total expenses incurred to complete your MBA. A more complicated approach might try and factor in the cost of 'lost opportunities' as well. For example, if you gave up a 45,000 USD job to join Tuck that goes into the investments!

IIM Shillong for CAT 2007

If you are writing the CAT this November, the govt. has good news for you. All CAT 2007* candidates automatically qualify for the 1st session (2008-2010) at the IIM Shillong. The only sore part : It has been christened Rajiv Gandhi Indian Institute of Management. Now I am quite appreciative of the efforts of the ex-PM but i don't quite like this idea of prefixing his name to the new IIM. Some of the greatest brand-creators and brand-custodians of this country have and will pass out of the hallowed portals of the IIMs and tinkering with that brand itself ain't such a great idea. They did it earlier with my college in Delhi: a few years after I passed out of the College of Business Studies i found out that the name of a freedom fighter had been added to the name. It now became a very boring sounding Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies. CBS sounded ok, if not cool. Nowadays students refer to the college as Sukhdev. Yipes!

Should you want to know more, you can contact the offices of Mr. Pramod Tandon, the Vice Chancellor of North Eastern Hill University ( NEHU). Mr. Tandon is currently doubling up as the Project Director of the Rajiv Gandhi IIM Shillong.

Address: NEHU Campus, Shillong, Meghalaya. Phone: 0364-2550101

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*The CAT 2007 notification issued on the 15th July 2007 doesn't mention the 7th IIM, therefore there was confusion amongst the students.

IIM Calcutta Campus: Virtual Tour

The IIM Calcutta site has added a new feature: "An Online Tour of the IIM-C campus". If that's where you are planning to go to do your MBA, it might be worthwhile to check it out. Click here.

I remember a friend of mine who used to take an evening walk in the IIT-Delhi campus, during the days of his IIT-JEE preparation. He found the walk very motivating - and it sure did work for him - got through the JEE successfully though he ended up doing his B.Tech a few thousand kilometres to the east, in IIT Kharagpur. You wouldn't mind landing up in an IIM a few thousand kilometres west of Kolkata, would you? No, i'm not talking of Indore.

Browsing the IIM Calcutta site, there is another interesting info i noted - not that you would be unaware of it, but an official line makes things that much more clear. This from the CAT page of the IIM Cal site..

Verbal Ability (VA)
This section explores your understanding of the English Language and also tests you on Reasoning Skills.

So there it is: i guess you need to get ready for more LR everywhere, English included.

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ps: I found the picture of the IIM Cal faculty members quite interesting. (are you a fitness freak?) So i added it here to add to the visual appeal of my blog!

Blog Advertising: A win-win situation

Many of the readers of this blog will be doing their MBA, specialising in advertising and marketing. As you will find out in the next few years, one of the biggest challenges for the advertiser is to make sure that the 'ad is actually seen' by the Target Audience. Of course, you will then get into more refined targets like 'reaching out to your audience at the lowest cost per head' (CPM or Cost Per Thousand as the Media Planners call it).

It's possibly because of this reason that marketeers loved the internet - here was a way to reach out to a focussed audience. Weblogs or Blogs as they are called took this revolution a step further - Each blog is a potential media - while a single blog may not have the traffic of a larger portal, but it has its own loyal audience. Marketers get an option through blog advertising to reach out to their audience in a language that they preferred listening to. Advertisers also get to link back to their own websites from the blogposts, helping them get quality traffic directly onto their sites.

For bloggers like me, this provides with an option to monetize my efforts. A win-win situation for everyone, ain't it? Smorty.Com, acting as a bridge between advertisers and bloggers is a place to check out for - for both advertisers and for bloggers. It's a great opportunity for bloggers in that you can now actually make money off your blog. How much you end up making is entirely upto you - your earnings are a function of the opportunities you will get, which are proportional to the efforts you put into your blog.

I have been using Smorty for the past few months and what i liked about them was - 1. Service Quality and 2. Speed of Response. Besides they are amongst the fastest in terms of approval and payments. Highly Recommended from this blog.

Favourite B-School: Opinion Poll Results

I had been running this "My Favourite B-School" opinion poll on this blog for the past 3 months and it's time now to share the results with you.

A total of 413 MBA aspirants have taken part in this poll so far. (still running) The b-school at No.1 is not very surprisingly the IIMs ( the six IIMs clustered together) - the IIMs were chosen as the B-School of choice by 193 respondents, a little under half the total number of respondents. B-School Rank 2 is XLRI, Jamshedpur - with 57 votes. At no.3 is MICA, the specialised b-school for marketing communications in Ahmedabad. 'Others' make it to No.4, closely followed behind by FMS, Delhi with 30 votes. 20 students voted a non-Indian B-School as their preferred place to do an MBA.

Are you preparing for CAT 2007 or CAT 2008? Or are you amongst the few that are not looking at the IIMs but at the specialised b-schools like MICA, TISS or IRMA - do let us know your favourite b-school by participating in the poll.