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M.B.A. Programs That Get You Where You Want to Go

With some 13,000 graduate schools of business across the globe, the M.B.A. degree has clearly become a commodity.

Even among elite schools, courses and case studies are pretty much water from the same well (i.e., finance, operations, marketing, accounting). So how do you choose? By using the rankings? Which ones? The Economist’s? Businessweek’s? The Financial Times’s? And if you do, how do you tell the difference between a school ranked No. 6 and a school ranked No. 7?

Don’t ask us. Don’t ask the schools, either. Their slick brochures try to be everything to everybody, and in the process they obscure rather than illuminate.

Conventional wisdom will tell you that Harvard is for Fortune 500 jobs, Wharton for Wall Street, Kellogg for marketing and Insead for multinational entities. There’s truth to some of it, but times change, and so do employers’ recruiting preferences. The smartest move might be to choose your business school by focusing on a very specific outcome and, assuming a good fit personally, going to the one with an impressive record of helping students achieve the same. Period.

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Credit...Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times

IF YOU WANT...

Go to Ross School of Business (University of Michigan)

This might come as a surprise: Amazon regularly hires more M.B.A.s from top-10 business schools than big Wall Street firms. And its demand is surging: In 2014, Amazon hired 40 percent more M.B.A.s than it did in 2013, a large chunk of them from Ross. The e-commerce giant hired 27 M.B.A.s from Michigan last year, displacing Ross’s historical No. 1 recruiter, Deloitte Consulting, and 37 the previous two years.

The most senior Ross graduate at Amazon is Peter Faricy, class of 1995 and vice president of Amazon Marketplace. Mr. Faricy says that while Ross graduates have traits common to most M.B.A.s — analytic ability and problem-solving skills — some curriculum-related offerings are particularly well suited to Amazon. One course takes students into the field to solve a problem for a sponsoring company. Last year, Amazon was home to three teams. Mr. Faricy worked on one while at Ross, using multilinear regressions to help executives at Target understand employee turnover; the experience, he said, opened his eyes to the importance of deep analytics.

Mr. Faricy also mentioned desirable soft skills — humility, listening and a hearty work ethic. Readers of “The Everything Store,” Brad Stone’s chronicle of the rise of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, will be aware that Mr. Bezos is one of the hardest-working C.E.O.s in the country, and he surely expects the same of his M.B.A. employees.

IF YOU WANT...

Go to Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern)

For an M.B.A., landing a job at McKinsey is a bit like trying to get into a competitive business school all over again. Except the field is much stronger, made up of only those who managed to pass the first hurdle. But graduates of Kellogg perform quite well the second time around. The school’s M.B.A.s are in demand at elite consulting firms, which hired 35 percent of its graduates last year, a higher percentage than at Harvard (23 percent) and Stanford (16 percent).

The top four recruiters at Kellogg in 2014 were McKinsey, Deloitte, Bain and the Boston Consulting Group. McKinsey alone has hired 215 Kellogg graduates over the last five years.

Elizabeth Ziegler, associate dean of M.B.A. programs at Kellogg and, more important, a former partner at McKinsey, says that consulting firms look for two specific things in M.B.A. graduates: a natural gift for building trust-based relationships and strong problem-solving skills. The school’s pedagogy is based on a team-based model, which develops the first. And its curriculum stresses the second, with a particular focus on helping students answer a question McKinsey consultants grapple with every day on behalf of clients: Do you know what problem you’re actually solving?

The school’s emphasis on persona is historic. In the early 1980s, Don Jacobs, then the dean, had a pioneering idea: Kellogg would interview every single applicant, assessing qualities like presence and articulateness — interpersonal skills that just so happen to be the most desired by consultants. The commitment continues. Today, Ms. Ziegler says, no one gets admitted without a successful interview.

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Credit...Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times

IF YOU WANT...

Go to Fuqua School of Business (Duke)

Silicon Valley hasn’t always welcomed M.B.A.s. After all, you don’t need a graduate degree to hatch a bold idea in your garage. Steve Jobs, Apple’s late chief, didn’t finish college and was known to have disdain for “suits,” whether investment bankers or management consultants. But the company, once the scrappy symbol of the tech counterculture, has undergone an evolution.

Two of Apple’s top 10 executives hail from Fuqua: the chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, and the senior vice president of operations, Jeff Williams. And they are, apparently, loyal. Apple has hired 32 Fuqua graduates over the past five years, while also providing 42 internships for Duke students.

Speaking in 2013 on the occasion of his 25th reunion, Mr. Cook stressed to students that while they should focus first on how to collaborate, they should look to write their own rules after that, words that might describe the ethos at Apple itself.

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Credit...Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times

IF YOU WANT...

Go to Kelley School of Business (Indiana University)

While M.B.A.s don’t dream of working at giant consumer products companies the way they did a few decades ago — today, it’s consulting, start-ups, tech giants or private equity — one of America’s legendary corporate success stories still draws them in hordes: the 177-year-old Procter & Gamble.

And P.&G. clearly has a thing for Kelley. The school is its biggest source of brand managers. Of the 172 Kelley alumni there, the most senior is Marc S. Pritchard, the chief brand officer, who also sits on Kelley’s dean’s council. The M.B.A. class “Marketing Performance and Productivity Analysis” could just as well be called “Getting You Ready to Work at P.&G.”

The closeness stretches back to 1950, when the company formed a joint research project with Dr. Joseph Muhler at Indiana University to develop and test a new toothpaste — with fluoride. P.&G. says the connection runs deeper than marketing, a specialty of Kelley’s. Monica Boutchard, P.&G.’s Indiana University recruiting team leader, who has an undergraduate degree from Kelley, credits the broad-based curriculum in preparing graduates to be leaders at P.&G., not just experts in finance or, well, marketing.

There’s that, as well as the fact that the university’s Bloomington campus is a mere 125 miles from Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati. Dean Idalene Kesner says that Midwestern companies tend to be good fits for Kelley graduates, as they’re looking for talented hard workers who have something sometimes lacking in their coastal counterparts: the humility to grow.

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Credit...Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times

IF YOU WANT...

Go to Harvard Business School

No, the world has not been turned upside down. The substantial resources Harvard has devoted to its entrepreneurial offerings in recent years are starting to show real results. By many accounts, Harvard has as strong a claim to being top start-up destination as Stanford does.

Anchored by its Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the school offers 33 graduate-level entrepreneurship courses, with the second-largest number of dedicated faculty after finance. But its push reaches well beyond the classroom. An annual New Venture Competition awards $150,000 in cash plus in-kind prizes. The school also assists graduates who are pursuing new ventures with loan reductions of $10,000 to $20,000 — last year, 21 student entrepreneurs received more than $325,000 through the program. Its biannual entrepreneurial summit gathers alumni with demonstrated early-stage traction, and an entrepreneurs-in-residence program invites accomplished founders (and funders) to hold weekly office hours to advise students.

Rob Biederman, class of 2014, says he entered Harvard Business School pretty much prepared to go back to Bain Capital, where he had been working in private equity. But a required first-year course, “Field III,” forces students, in teams of six, to found a company. The professorial advice and an eventual $5,000 in seed money and free office space on campus gave Mr. Biederman start-up fever, and he and his classmates created HourlyNerd — a rent-an-M.B.A. business model to disrupt the low end of the consulting industry — and had it up and rolling by the end of their first year. They met Mark Cuban — the Dallas Mavericks owner, who kicked in $450,000 — when he visited a class, and connected with other investors through a classmate. (No surprise there: Harvard says that 25 percent of venture capital partners in the world are H.B.S. alumni, providing significant networking possibilities.) Recent graduates have also founded the likes of Birchbox, Rent the Runway and Gilt Groupe.

John A. Byrne, author of eight books on business and founder and editor of Poets & Quants, a website that covers business education, ranked HarvardNo. 1 in his most recent assessment of start-up culture. Stanford’s graduates usually raise more money, he points out, but Harvard grads consistently start more companies.

H.B.S. is so serious about the push that it recently backtracked on a longstanding policy not to participate in Entrepreneur magazine’s ranking of graduate programs. And the decision had its desired effect: Harvard came in at No. 1 last year, while Stanford, long considered the entrepreneurial hotbed among M.B.A. schools, placed fifth.

IF YOU WANT...

Go to Stanford Graduate School of Business

Private equity has the most lucrative jobs for M.B.A.s, but also the fewest. “Only a handful of business schools on the planet can even pretend to open doors in P.E.,” says Matt Symonds, co-author of “ABC of Getting the M.B.A. Admissions Edge” and a director at Fortuna Admissions, a business school admissions consultant.

While East Coast schools would seem an obvious choice given their proximity to Wall Street, private equity isn’t tied to New York in the way investment banking is, and in recent years Stanford has managed to defy conventional wisdom. Its graduates’ success in landing coveted private equity jobs has proved it is more than just a recruiting ground for California’s technology industry.

In 2014, Stanford put 12 percent of its graduates into private equity jobs, a larger percentage than Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania (8.5 percent), Booth at the University of Chicago (5.1 percent) and Columbia (2.4 percent), and a shade less than Harvard (13 percent). While more Harvard graduates entered the industry, Stanford’s starting salaries last year for private equity were the highest for any job at any school — ever. Median base salary was $170,000 (compared with Harvard’s $150,000), and signing bonuses plus other guaranteed compensation took the total take up to $385,000 (compared with Harvard’s $255,000). One lucky 2013 M.B.A. actually received a shocking $522,000 starting package.

Madhav V. Rajan, the acting dean, points out that Stanford’s long heritage in teaching students how to scale small, fast-growing companies dovetails perfectly with its more analytical finance courses to prepare students for jobs in P.E.

Several of today’s most prominent private equity firms count Stanford graduates as founders or early hires, including TPG Capital (James Coulter), General Atlantic (Steven A. Denning, who is chairman of Stanford’s board of trustees and a member of its advisory council) and S.P.O. Partners (John H. Scully, William J. Patterson and William E. Oberndorf). The legendary finance professor Jack McDonald has been teaching a fundamental, value-based approach to investment at Stanford for the better part of two decades.

A recurring guest lecturer: Warren Buffett.

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Credit...Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times

IF YOU WANT...

Go to HEC Paris

HEC Paris isn’t just about luxury — The Economist named it the top business school in Europe in 2014, and the fourth best globally — but the school is a no-brainer for an M.B.A. hellbent on working in the luxury goods industry. Its proximity to Paris is clearly crucial. Students have the opportunity to visit stores, workshops and headquarters of a Who’s Who of luxury icons, including the behemoth Kering (Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga, Brioni, Gucci, Puma), Cartier, Chanel and Hermès. Named for Kering itself, the five-year-old luxury program is restricted to just 50 students annually, and those 50 consistently find jobs with some of the biggest brands in Paris and elsewhere.

HEC graduates include the chief executives of Kering, Balenciaga and L’Oréal. Vincent Bastien, a graduate and C.E.O. of Louis Vuitton from 1988 to 1995, is a professor in the program as well as co-author of the industry bible, “The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands.”

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Credit...Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times

IF YOU WANT...

Go to Yale School of Management

Edward A. Snyder is reinventing Yale’s business school. Soon after his arrival as dean in 2011, the school created the Global Network for Advanced Management. The network has since assembled an impressive membership of 27 schools from five continents, including well-known names (Insead, London School of Economics) as well as lesser-known ones in China (Fudan University School of Management), the Philippines (Asian Institute of Management), Nigeria (Lagos Business School) and Turkey (Koc University School of Business).

The consortium has produced joint faculty research and case studies, and created online courses available only to students at network schools. Students also have the opportunity to pursue study at another network school — 630 did so this March.

Those seeking a truly global education always have Insead or the London School of Economics to choose from, but as stand-alone business schools they don’t offer the resources and credential of an Ivy League institution. “The concept of the network was waiting to happen,” Dr. Snyder says, “and Yale is a great convener.”

Since its establishment in 1976, the Yale School of Management has insisted that business, government and nonprofit leaders need to better understand one another, giving the school a distinct public/private flavor. Dr. Snyder makes clear: “We’re not abandoning the school’s longstanding mission. Environmental sustainability, for example, is not going to get solved by the government, the market or the nonprofit sector alone. We’re continuing within the frame, but with a more modern — and more global — view.”

IF YOU WANT...

Go to Presidio Graduate School

The youngest school on this list, Presidio, has been around only 12 years, created by a lawyer and a former advertising executive who believed that established schools weren’t producing the kind of socially minded graduates the country needs.

Presidio is doing well toward that end. It has placed sustainability directors at companies from Salesforce.com to Facebook, and its graduates have founded sustainability-focused companies like Muir Data Systems (data management for the wind turbine industry) and Mission Motors (electric vehicle systems).

They’re playing in the big leagues as well. Katie Schmitz Eulitt, who holds an executive education certificate in sustainable management from the school, is director of market research for the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, a large-scale effort to move the field of accounting toward the use of sustainability metrics.

The nonprofit organization Net Impact publishes an annual guide to business school programs, and last year Presidio placed No. 1 in social impact and No. 2 in environmental sustainability, after the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At 34, the school’s average student is nearly a decade older than the typical M.B.A. (the average GMAT test-taker is 26). Presidio is also one of just a handful of business schools where women (60 percent) outnumber men. Located in Presidio National Park in San Francisco, it has a campus-lite approach: Most courses are online, with one in-person weekend of classes a month. That helps keep costs down. A two-year degree is $62,400, about half the typical tuition. But those savings come with a price: Sustainability-focused M.B.A.s give up big-time starting salaries. Presidio’s average is in the mid-$80,000s.

William Shutkin, president of Presidio, says that’s not a concern for its graduates. “The decision to choose Presidio is a moral one, because our graduates know they’re doing the right thing,” he says. “But someday in the not-too-distant future, chief sustainability officers will be compensated as well or better than their counterparts. The arc of history is bending toward us.”

Duff McDonald is author of “The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business.” He is writing a book about Harvard Business School.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 14 of Education Life with the headline: M.B.A. Matchups. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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