Behold; Dealbreaker's First Annual MBA Rank-Out

Admittedly, we're not the kind of website to do lists or rankings. After all, these types of projects often require things like thoughtfulness, professionalism, organization, staffing and "data."

But rankings are super-popular these days and we want in on that action so we put on our tin foil hats thinking caps and spent some time ruminating like adults on how to rank MBA programs. And it didn't take long to come up with the idea that MBAs are a different animal these days but no one is really ranking them that way.

In this new economy, MBAs are an expensive investment in your future, a down payment on escaping your crappy low-level job at a bulge bracket and becoming a decision-maker with equity at a startup. They are perhaps less necessary than they've ever been but super powerful in the right hands at the right time. The modern MBA is a luxury item, and like any luxury item it should be evaluated on the basis of how quickly you can pay it off. An MBA from NYU Stern that plagues you with debt in your sixties is perhaps as useless in the long-term as one from Trump University.

So thanks to our partners at Kaplan, and with help from our friends at CommonBond, we took the MBA programs with the best job placement reputations and ranked them on what we are calling their RoI (ie who's probably paying them off fastest) giving us what we think is the most honest assessment of the value of the modern MBA.

Basically, we made a list and it's a pretty good one. We think you'll enjoy seeing how mediocre the one you got is (Wharton) or realizing that there is weird value out there if you open your mind to living somewhere awful for awhile (Rice).

Enjoy.

Dealbreaker's 2017 MBA Rank-Out