Foster Focuses on Impact, DEI, and Health of Community, Retains Strong MBA Ranking
#21 Poets & Quants Full-time MBA Ranking Result Reflects Continued Excellence in Learning Experience, Career Outcomes as a Context for Innovation
In a year where MBA program rankings have been paused, boycotted, and delayed, Poet & Quants bucked the trend to release its ranking. Their meta-analysis of the five major rankings includes only one updated result released in March 2020, that of US News & World Report. Perhaps unsurprisingly, little changed in their results. Foster stayed steady in its Full-time MBA rank of #21.
What remains the same is continued excellence in the quality of the program experience and career outcomes. Last November, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked our Learning Experience #10. Looking back, in 2019 Poets & Quants listed the Foster School of Business as the tech industry’s favorite B-School. Further accolades were bestowed by recruiters for our school with ninety-nine percent of Foster MBAs securing jobs within 3 months of graduation—the highest rate in the U.S. Sixty percent of our graduates accepted positions at tech companies including Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, Expedia, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Salesforce, Tableau, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Another 16% chose positions in the consulting industry where Foster MBAs were hired by firms such as Accenture, CBRE, Deloitte Consulting, KPMG, McKinsey & Company, Point B, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
In 2020, while the pandemic has brought stasis to many areas of work and life, Foster School stakeholders have been swimming upstream to innovate in several ways that benefit students. Our strategic planning and branding initiatives have brought greater focus to how we live our school’s purpose. Our healthy partnerships with The Consortium and the Forte Foundation are helping us manifest greater diversity and inclusion. Foster Dean Frank Hodge appointed an Associate Dean for Inclusion and Diversity—Christina Fong—who has been engaging all areas of our school to advance the interests of underrepresented populations. We are prioritizing diversity in our faculty and staff hires, in our scholarships, and in care of our community. To ensure relevance, we are engaged in a data-driven curriculum revision process to equip our graduates to lead with impact.
In this year like no other, we have been very focused on the overall health of our community. In the most literal sense, we have prioritized attending to our personal physical health and public health by following guidelines and best practices. We have taken time to learn more about each other and the undeniable need for greater social justice in the world. Our every decision has been focused on maintaining the integrity of the program experience in a remote environment, attending to support for learning and our connection with each other. During this challenging time, it has never been more apparent that community matters—it is the strength of the Foster community that fortifies us. The sense of what we can do together, and how we can help each other to have our greatest impact has long been a part of our culture, but never has it shone so brightly as now.
Guest post by Wendy Guild,
Assistant Dean of MBA Programs
