Rutgers ranked No. 1 Public MBA for Entrepreneurship on East Coast

Rutgers Business School’s strength in preparing MBA students to create new businesses and to demonstrate the innovative thinking of entrepreneurs was highlighted in a new ranking by Poets & Quants and Inc. Magazine.

The joint ranking set out to measure the entrepreneurial climate at the world’s top business schools. The inaugural ranking included only 27 schools. This year, the listing contains 50 schools.   

Rutgers Business School was ranked as the No. 24 Best MBA Program for Entrepreneurship globally. That ranking placed Rutgers as the No. 1 Public MBA for Entrepreneurship in the Northeast and among public business schools on the East Coast.

Rutgers also ranks as the No. 4 MBA Program for Entrepreneurship among its peers in the Big Ten based on the rating by Poets & Quants and Inc. Magazine.  

“The ranking shows the strength of our faculty knowledge and the MBA curriculum that is imprinted on our MBA students,” said Rutgers Business School Dean Lei Lei. “In the face of the fast-changing world of technology and digitization, and the Disruption Era, this specialty ranking is more important than ever.”

One of the major factors in the ranking was the percentage of MBA students who launched businesses after graduation. Several of the other categories that factored into measuring the programs: Percentage of MBA elective courses with 100% of the curriculum focused on entrepreneurship or innovation; total startup award money available to MBAs; and percentage of full-time faculty teaching an entrepreneurship or innovation course.

In addition to learning in the classroom, Rutgers MBA students with business ideas and nascent companies have the opportunity to compete for start-up funding in an annual business plan competition. The competition has helped to launch and grow numerous ventures founded by Rutgers MBA students, including Playa Bowls, Bergen Botanicals, Emma’s Premium Services, the Turf, Surf and Earth restaurant, and P-Nuff Crunch. Juan Salinas, a food scientist turned entrepreneur, recently sealed a $400,000 deal with Mark Cuban on an episode of Shark Tank.

“This ranking demonstrates the strength of the entrepreneurial ecosystem around Rutgers Business School, said Doug Miller, associate dean for MBA programs. "When our MBA students want to start a business, or just learn how to be entrepreneurial in their corporate role, they can draw on our RBS-based centers and faculty, coursework and technology from across the university, the start-up accelerator right in our Newark building, and a large network of alumni and investors."

"This ranking was specifically about full-time MBA programs, but the benefits of the ecosystem extend to our more than 900 part-time MBA students as well," Miller said. “We hope this recognition will attract more candidates with technical and scientific expertise to Rutgers who want to learn how to innovate and succeed as entrepreneurs.”

For the second year in a row, Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis was No. 1 in the global ranking by Poets & Quants and Inc. Magazine.

Among schools located on the East Coast, Babson College ranked No. 1. Rutgers ranked higher than Yale School of Management, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business.

- Susan Todd