The ranking comes from Poets & Quants, a business education outlet that released its survey results on Dec. 20.
The undergraduate business degree program at Elon’s Martha and Spencer Love School of Business ranks among the best in the country, according to new rankings from business education news outlet Poets & Quants.
Elon’s program ranks No. 56 in the survey by Poets & Quants, a ranking that includes private and public institutions of all sizes. The survey methodology focused on three main components — school admissions standards, alumni perspectives on the academic experience and employment outcomes data. View the complete rankings are available here.
Raghu Tadepalli, dean of the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, said recognition in such a competitive ranking speaks to the quality of education the school delivers and the accomplishments of its alumni.
“The Love School of Business continues to compare very favorably with nationally known universities and indeed ranks above many of them,” Tadepalli said. “It is an honor to work with a dedicated group of faculty and staff who place student learning and success front and center.”
Elon achieved its highest marks in the area of career outcomes for alumni, which looked at the percentage of students with internships before graduation, with full-time jobs within three months of graduation along with average salary and signing bonus for the Class of 2019. The ranking also took into consideration the percentage of the Class of 2019 that had internships before their senior year. Elon ranked 30th in the country in this category.
“The school’s dedication to having their students learning both inside and outside of classrooms seems to have paid off, as almost 90 percent of both the 2017 and 2018 classes student body found full-time employment just a few months after graduation,” Poets & Quants noted in its overview of the Love School of Business rankings.
For admissions standards, the rankings considered average SAT scores for the last entering class, the percentage who finished in the top 10 percent of their classes in high school and the acceptance rate for the business school program.
The academic experience was based on surveys of alumni who had been away from school for at least two years to determine how satisfied they were. Among the questions alumni were asked were whether they would recommend the school to a friend, whether the business degree was worth the time and cost and how effective the career advising effort of the school was. Beyond a battery of 17 questions, extra weight was given to whether they had a “significant experience,” defined as a major consulting project, thesis, or other program feature instrumental to their professional development, or a meaningful global immersion, and if their first jobs after graduation were in their desired job functions, industries and companies.
Elon ranked 47th for alumni experience and 86th for admissions.
Poets & Quants is headed by Editor-in-Chief John Byrne, who along with being the founder of C-Change Media formerly served as executive editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, Businessweek.com and Fast Company. He created the first regularly published rankings of business schools for Businessweek in 1988 and has authored several business school guidebooks.
Elon’s Love School of Business was one of five North Carolina schools to make the list, joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (No. 9), Wake Forest University (No. 22), the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (No. 59) and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (No. 75). The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania took the top spot in rankings for a third consecutive year.