Choosing schools - Rankings
How do you know where you can get in? Applicants usually define reach, range, and safety schools. But when admissions are so “holistic”, you can’t easily venture a guess. Indian MBA admissions has it’s flaws, but you can make very strong predictions about your odds since each IIM publishes it’s weightage for GPA, work ex, interview, gender, even across reservation categories.
Rankings like Bloomberg, Financial Times, US News, QS etc are a good place to start, but you’ll soon realize how wonky these are too. Tuck is #2 (ahead of Harvard and Wharton) in Bloomberg and #20 in QS (behind Indiana and Boston Uni)! Besides, even if there were a reliable ranking, it would be a general one. You’re probably better off going to Stern than Haas if you want to work in banking, despite Stern being 5 ranks lower. Over time I made my own preference order, but to start with, these ranked buckets are what I followed:
| Bucket | Schools |
|---|---|
| HSW | Harvard, Stanford, Wharton |
| M8 | HSW + Booth, Kellogg, Haas, Columbia, Sloan (I added Haas to usual M7) |
| T10 | M7 + Stern, Fuqua, Tuck |
| T15 | T10 + Ross, Yale, Darden, Anderson, Marshall |
| T20 | T15 + Tepper, Cornell, McCombs, Gouizueta, Georgetown |
Published: 20th March, 2022