The University’s Carlson School of Management placed 14th among the best undergraduate business schools in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report’s rankings released Friday.

Jerry Rinehart, director of Carlson’s undergraduate program, said the department is pleased with being the 14th best business school nationwide, but rankings aren’t everything.

“The methodology for the business school rankings are not the best,” Rinehart said, “but we are happy to come out on top.”

U.S. News weighs a school’s mission, region and 16 academic excellence indicators to derive its rankings.

Rinehart said he wished there were a survey of the quality of students within the report.

“The business school rankings are not very quantitative and are based simply on reputation,” Rinehart said. “They don’t take into account the quality of the students.

“It takes a long time for reputation to catch up with reality, and I think our reality is better than our reputation.”

But in a written statement, Carlson’s interim dean, Larry Benveniste, said, “The ranking attests to the high quality of the Carlson’s schools students. The average ACT and SAT scores of our incoming freshmen, for example, were in the top 7 percent of college-bound seniors.”

Specialized undergraduate programs within Carlson were honored in the report. Management information systems placed the highest, with a fourth-place ranking. Quantitative analysis/methods took 11th, and both marketing and management ranked 17th.

Cody Ayres, a University senior, said he initially picked the Twin Cities campus because he was accepted into the Carlson School as a freshman.

“I think the students they recruit have a big part to do with it,” Ayres said.

As a whole, the University ranked 19th, tying with the University of Florida, in the “top public national universities-doctorial” category for public national universities.

On the same list, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor ranked third, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison ranked eighth.

The University did not place on the magazine’s list of the top 50 schools regardless of classification.

U.S. News uses seven indicators to rank the academic quality of a university: academic reputation, retention, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, graduation rate performance and alumni contribution rate.

Anne Preller covers student life
and welcomes comments at [email protected]