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College of Business makes the grade — again

March 8, 2011

The Northern Illinois University College of Business has once again secured a position on Bloomberg-Businessweek’s list of best undergraduate business schools.

The college moved up 10 spots from last year to No. 84. Only 139 of 579 accredited business schools in the country were invited to participate in the ranking process. This is the fifth year of the rankings, and the NIU College of Business has been included since the inception.

Denise Schoenbachler

Denise Schoenbachler

“I am extremely proud of our faculty and students for helping us earn this ranking,” said Dean Denise Schoenbachler. “It continues to place us among an elite group of schools and validates for us that we are providing an excellent education for our students.”

The Bloomberg-BusinessWeek rankings are based upon several factors: A student survey, a recruiter survey, median starting salaries, the number of students admitted to the Top 35 MBA programs and an academic quality measure based on standardized test scores and other factors.

NIU scored particularly well with recruiters, who ranked the school 30th in the nation.

The recruiters were asked a series of questions to assess which programs turn out the best graduates, which have the most innovative curricula and the most effective career services departments. Results from the current year’s survey are averaged in with data from the two previous years. The recruiter score counted for 20 percent of the ranking.

“It is particularly gratifying to be rated so highly by recruiters,” Schoenbachler said. “They are in a unique position to measure the quality of our graduates and our program against others from across the country, and this ranking is a tremendous endorsement of both.”

NIU also fared well in the student survey of graduating seniors, ranking 64th for student satisfaction.

The 50-quesiton survey asked students about everything from the quality of teaching (NIU faculty earned a grade of A) to the quality of job placement services (also a grade of A) to the quality of university recreation facilities. The data from the current year were again averaged with data from the two previous years. The student survey accounted for 30 percent of the score.

Among the four Illinois public universities ranked in the survey, NIU trailed only the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, which ranked 30th overall, and was rated ahead of Illinois State (93) and the University of Illinois-Chicago (109). NIU was also the only public university to improve in the rankings.

Private universities ranked were DePaul and Loyola.