Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia Terry College of Business has one of the nation’s best undergraduate programs in business, based on the newest ranking by Bloomberg BusinessWeekmagazine.
The Terry College is ranked 49th overall and 18th among public business schools.
UGA’s business school scored especially well on the survey’s measures of student satisfaction. Terry College ranked 18th overall in the student survey, which included 50 questions on “everything from the quality of teaching to recreational facilities,” according to the magazine. Terry’s year-to-year improvement on the student survey bucked the magazine’s overall trend, which saw student satisfaction decline 14 percent from 2009.
In spite of an exceptionally challenging job market, graduates of the Terry College reported a higher median starting salary than two years ago. The starting salary reported by Terry graduates in the 2010 survey was $46,500, compared with $44,000 in the 2008 survey.
“We’re especially gratified to see that the program has improved in the eyes of our students,” said Robert T. Sumichrast, dean of the Terry College. “They are the ones who are best able to quickly see the improvements we are making.”
Sumichrast noted that innovations in the undergraduate curriculum remain a point of emphasis with the faculty. For the first time next fall, juniors entering the Terry College are going to experience a new cohort class schedule called “Foundations First.” After they’ve been accepted to a major, students will be grouped as cohorts for their first two semesters and will take the same core business classes together.
“Taking the same business classes with a common group of students will encourage a higher level of teamwork among students throughout their academic careers and help build a professional network of friends and future colleagues when they graduate,” Sumichrast said. “More importantly, our faculty will be able to raise the bar academically because they’ll know their students are coming in with the same understanding of business fundamentals.”
Bloomberg BusinessWeek used nine measures to rank business schools. In addition to the student survey (which accounted for 30 percent of the final ranking), the measures included a survey of corporate recruiters, median starting salaries for graduates, and the number of alumni each program sends to top MBA programs. The magazine also calculated an academic quality rating for each school that combined average SAT scores, student-faculty ratios, class size, the percentage of students with internships, and the number of hours students devote to class work.
The University of Notre Dame was ranked first overall in the 2010 survey, followed by the University of Virginia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s complete ranking of more than 100 undergraduate business programs is available on the magazine’s website. Bloomberg BusinessWeek announced its fifth annual ranking of the best undergraduate business programs on March 4.