The profile was last updated on February 22, 2016. If you have any questions, please contact our general manager.
The Weatherhead School is housed in one of the most unique educational buildings in the world, a virtual museum of modern architecture. The full-time MBA is a four-semester program. The curriculum—regardless of concentration—features on-going efforts in design management, sustainable business, social entrepreneurship, and design thinking. These academic themes, entitled Manage by Designing and Sustainable Enterprise, help students break from the norm of viewing every challenge through the same spreadsheet-based prism.
Aside from the core curriculum, a distinctive feature of the first-year experience is the Top Management Dialogues series. In this series, students work with teams of top executives to define and deal with real problems currently facing their organizations. In the second year of our program, students are exposed to Manage by Designing and Sustainable Enterprise. As part of the integrated MBA curriculum, students explore these and other topics via a collection of year-long elective courses that emphasize experiential learning.
The MBA experience at Weatherhead is small and intimate, with a class that numbers slightly less than 60 new full-time students a year. So everyone gets to know each other and their professors. Weatherhead is nestled in the heart of Cleveland and its arts and cultural district—University Circle, with its 15 museums and cultural institutions including the world-famous Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Museum of Art.
Rankings Analysis: It’s always important to remember that a ranked MBA program is among the very best in the world. In the U.S. the top 100 full-time MBA programs–which is the basis for all the major rankings–are in the top 20th percentile, and in the world, it’s more like the top 5th percentile.
The Weatherhead School of Management tends to hover in the 50s to low 60 range, with its latest ranking from Poets&Quants at 63. Weatherhead has ranked as high as 51st by Poets&Quants in our inaugural composite ranking in 2010.
The school’s best ranking of late comes from U.S. News & World Report which placed Weatherhead at 63rd best in the U.S. in 2015, up two places from a year earlier. The Financial Times and The Economist rankings are global so when the schools makes those lists, its rank is obviously higher because those lists include MBA programs all over the world. The Economist ranked Weatherhead 83rd in 2014, up there places from a year earlier. The last time the school was ranked by the FT was 2013 when it placed 94th.
Weatherhead has not published in its employment report its top employers, preferring to list all of the firms that hired the school’s graduates.
