Entrepreneurship was given considerable importance by the graduating students, recent grads and employers surveyed by Bloomberg Businessweek for its Best B-School Rankings 2023. Top grades in this index helped vault the Stanford Graduate School of Business to first place in the overall rankings.
What’s important to survey responders gets boosted in the Bloomberg Businessweek calculations. For the overall rankings, therefore, what counts is not only the absolute score, but the weighting given to each index. In this way, the Bloomberg Businessweek rankings reflect what matters to stakeholders.
In the index of entrepreneurship, there was a noteworthy spread of 8.1 points between, for example, Stanford (89.6) and Harvard (81.5). The weighting of those 8.1 points gave Stanford the critical edge needed to secure first place, winning out not only over Harvard, but over four other contenders.
1) Stanford GSB
2) Chicago (Booth)
3) Dartmouth (Tuck) (tied)
3) Virginia (Darden) (tied)
5) Columbia Business School
6) Harvard Business School
The importance of the entrepreneurship index to Stanford can be seen if one considers that the difference in overall scores between first-place Stanford and second-place Chicago Booth is only 1.6 percentage points. This may seem small, but the difference in scores that mark subsequent placements in the overall rankings are sometimes as small as one-tenth of one percent.
Nevertheless, Stanford’s excellence in entrepreneurship is not merely numerical, but substantive. “Stanford’s connections to the technology startups, venture capital firms and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have boosted the school’s desirability,” reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Stanford’s longstanding synergy with the tech world begins with the curriculum. Stanford offers over 90 courses for students aspiring to create or support new businesses. For example, in “Formation of New Ventures,” a team of faculty and experienced entrepreneurs present an array of cases that take students from identifying an opportunity all the way through an exit.
Beyond the classroom, students can engage with the Stanford Venture Studio, the Entrepreneurial Summer Internship Program and a seemingly endless stream of workshops, events and lectures that connect students with other branches of the university and business communities.
Stanford’s “Five Lenses of Entrepreneurship” introduce students to various forms of entrepreneurship that go beyond stereotypes, including “Founding a Company,” “Joining an Existing Startup,” “Entrepreneurship by Acquisition,” “Corporate Innovation” and “Social Innovation.”
Entrepreneurship permeates both the GSB and the university as a whole. For example, Stanford Ecopreneurship, new this year, is a joint program of the GSB and the Doerr School of Sustainability, aimed at “enabling students to build public, private, and nonprofit-sector organizations that can take sustainability solutions to scale.”
Additionally, Stanford reports on its website that 19% of the class graduating in 2022 went into entrepreneurship. Although this is not factored in to the Bloomberg Businessweek rankings, this is a testimony to the conviction as well as the strength of Stanford’s commitment to entrepreneurship. Of the 426 GSB graduates, 81 chose to go into entrepreneurship, rather than one of the top three employment categories for recent MBA graduates. In 2023-24, Bloomberg Businessweek reported those categories to be:
4,152 Consulting
3,064 Financial
2,832 Technology
Schools looking to rise in the rankings, if they were to care, might do so by surpassing Stanford in other indexes, such as the learning index described in the article linked below, but it would be difficult to overtake Stanford in entrepreneurship. And as long as stakeholders continue to value entrepreneurship, which will add weight to this index in the Bloomberg Businessweek ratings, it will be difficult to unseat the five-year reigning champion.
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