Business school earns top rankings

Once again, the Kelley School of Business has been recognized as one of the top overall programs in the nation. In national rankings of business schools across the country, the Wall Street Journal and the Princeton Review selected the Kelley school, its programs and faculty, for outstanding excellence.\nIn its annual rankings of business schools, released Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal named the Kelley school No. 13 in a listing of regional business schools. The report also selected the marketing and accounting programs for academic excellence, ranking them fifth and seventh respectively. Kelley was also ranked fourth by recruiters from consumer products companies. \n"I am delighted that we were ranked No. 7 in accounting, No. 5 in marketing and No. 4 by recruiters from consumer goods companies," said Dan Smith, interim dean of the Kelley school. "These results are similar to last year and place us among the nation's top MBA programs."\nTo compile the rankings, the Journal used surveys and interviews with corporate recruiters. Recruiters' perceptions of schools were measured in 20 areas, including leadership potential, teamwork skills and interpersonal qualities.\nTerrill Cosgray, director of the MBA program, said he is thrilled a ranking group has acknowledged the high quality of the school.\n"We are also glad our recruiters have expressed confidence in the quality of our students," he said.\nIn a separate ranking released Tuesday, the Princeton Review recognized the Kelley School as the No. 1 program for "best professors" and No. 3 for "best campus facilities."\nThe Princeton Review, also known for its annual "Best Colleges" ranking, interviewed 11,000 students at 143 MBA programs nationally. According to its Web site, the Princeton Review asked students more than 40 questions about themselves, their career plans, their school's academics, their student body and their campus to determine the school's ranking.\n"We continue to enjoy national status, since 71 percent of our incoming students are from outside the Midwest," Idie Kesner, MBA program chair, co-director of MBA academies and the Frank P. Popoff Chair of Strategic Management said in a statement.\nCosgray said he was not surprised the Kelley school received high rankings from the Princeton Review, since IU has had a long tradition of high quality faculty.\n"We think that we deserved the positive rankings we got," Cosgray said. "We've long known we have had the best faculty in the country and we are glad somebody externally has recognized it."\nDr. Shailendra Jain, assistant professor of marketing, came to the business school two years ago from Cornell University in New York. Jain said he came to IU because of the resources the business school offered.\n"I felt this school was serious about the quality of teaching," he said.\nJain said the faculty at the business school works extremely hard to ensure there's a huge amount of investments and resources placed in helping students succeed.\n"The faculty cares about the students and think about their aspirations and goals," Jain said. "We treat them with an extreme amount of respect and recognition that they come here not just to get an education, but to decide for the rest of their lives what they are going to do."\nCosgray said this is not the first time the Kelley faculty has been recognized. An Oct. 2002 issue of Business Week magazine ranked the Kelley faculty members as the third best teachers in the nation. \nMore recently, U.S. News & World Report recognized the IU Kelley School of Business as No. 11 in the nation out of 248 schools in its annual ranking of the nation's top colleges and universities entitled "America's Best Colleges 2005," released in August.\nThe Kelley School of Business offers undergraduate and graduate education programs to about 4,600 full-time students on the IU-Bloomington campus and about 1,200 students on the IU-Purdue University Indianapolis campus.\n"We have long known that Kelley school faculty are strong in terms of both research and teaching," Smith said. "I view the Princeton Review ranking of our faculty as No. 1 in the country to be confirmation of our own internal performance tracking measures. Likewise, I was not surprised to see that our graduate facilities are ranked highly; they are truly world-class."\n-- Contact campus editor Lori Geller at lfgeller@indiana.edu .