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Chicagos Booth vs. Northwesterns Kellogg School
by John A. Byrne
The central piazza of the new Harper Center at Chicago's Booth
School of Business. Photo by John A. Byrne
Outside of Boston, which can boast Harvard and MIT, theres
pretty much only one other major city in the world that can lay
claim to a pair of world-class graduate schools of business:
Chicago. Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management and
the University of Chicagos Booth School of Business are close to
each other in several respects. Their full-time MBA enrollments are
roughly the same size, while they both offer sizable part-time and
EMBA programs as well. Both schools also frequently rank rank near
each other in some of the most influential rankings. On the other
hand, these are two vastly different schools in their approach to
business education. Historically, Chicago has been a quant school
that has placed nearly half of its graduates in finance jobs.
Kellogg is a general management school, with a strong reputation
for marketing. These two schools are highly competitive with each
other. When Kellogg MBAs won a Real Estate Challenge competition
against their Booth counterparts in June of 2010, Kellogg actually
issued a press release on the victory, noting that Kellogg had
beaten Booth for the second year in a row. One other similarity?
Both schools have new deans. Kellogg is now led by Sally Blount,
who had been dean of New York Universitys undergraduate business
program, while Booths new leader is Sunil Kumar, who had been an
operations professor and associate dean for academic affairs at
Stanfords Graduate School of Business. In some ways, Kumar has the
tougher job because he has taken over from a highly popular dean in
Ted Snyder who championed more progress at Chicago than any leader
in recent memory.
The most dramatic differences between these two MBA educational
giants?
Geography: Youd think that the University of Chicago would be in
the center of Chicago. It isnt. Its in Hyde Park, about a 20-minute
train ride to the edge of Chicagos downtown. Public transporation
isnt ideal, and a crime-infested neighborhood separates the campus
from downtown Chicago. Nonetheless, Hyde Parkwhere President Obama
used to liveis a pretty and relatively comfortable place. Kellogg
is in Evanston, Ill., about a 30-minute train ride into the
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heart of Chicago. It has the look and feel of a typical
university town such as Ann Arbor, Mich., or Madison, Wis. In
either case, you have immediate and quick access to one of Americas
greatest cities. As the third largest city in America, Chicago is
an exciting place to be, with a thriving music scene, first-class
restaurants and bars, and awesome cultural attractions, including
the worlds second largest art museum, the Art Institute. Its a
gorgeous place, with 31 miles of lakefront, including nearly 19
miles of bike paths and 33 beaches. The one very big downside: the
winters can be absolutely brutal.
Size: Chicago and Northwestern have the largest MBA programs in
the world. Chicago has a full-time MBA enrollment of 1,185
students, while Kellogg is slighly larger, with 1,241. At either
place, theres a lot going on, from part-time MBA and Executive MBA
programs to significant executive education programming. Indeed,
Chicago has more part-time students (1,700) than it has full-time
students. Chicago, in fact, offers five full-time and part-time MBA
programs, including EMBA programs in Chicago, London, and
Singapore, as well as evening MBA and weekend MBA programs in
downtown Chicago at its Gleacher Center. Then, theres a PhD program
with about 130 students. Kelloggs offerings are just as broad: With
1,100 part-time MBA students, the school has both week night and
Saturday part-time programs in Wiebolt Hall in downtown Chicago as
well as Evanston, along with three different EMBAs, including a
program in Miami, Fla., and an equally large PhD program. What all
this means is that at both Chicago and Kellogg the faculty is
spread awfully thin because its stretched across all of these
obligations.
Kellogg's Don Jacobs Center at Northwestern University. Photo by
John A. Byrne
Culture: For years, Chicago was known as a haven of sorts for
quant jocks. By and large, the finance geeks dominated the student
culture, while a formidable and highly acclaimed faculty ruled the
academic roost. Its not that Chicago is all about finance and
numbers, says Sarah McGinty, a member of the Class of 2010. Its
about thinking quantitatively, not being quantitative. Departing
Dean Ted Snyder has noted that the faculty culture collided with
the MBA culture. The result: a great business school noted for its
academic rigor (six present and former Nobel Prize winners) and
some of the most distinguished professors in the business but
little sense of true community. Some of this has changed somewhat
over the years, particularly with the opening of the Harper Center.
But the school purposely lacks core cohort groups and has no
residence halls for its MBAs, factors that make it harder for real
community to occur.
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Some Chicago students say the school still lacks the camaraderie
youll find at many other b-schools, especially Kellogg, and that
some students graduate from Chicago with only a handful of people
they would call friends. Kellogg, on the other hand, has a strong
student culture of involvement and collaboration. Despite its much
larger size, Kellogg has managed to create a smart and
down-to-earth community that is nearly as close-knit as Stanford or
Dartmouth. There are many reasons for this difference but probably
the most influential one is the fact that Kellogg interviews every
single applicant. The result: the interpersonnel skills of Kellogg
students are extremely high and get greater attention here than
Chicago or many other schools. Put highly intelligent, yet friendly
and outgoing people together, and youre going to get a strong
culture that approximates a sense of family. It was and still is a
big part of the secret of Kelloggs success (See profile on and
video interview of legendary Kellogg Dean Don Jacobs for more
insight into the interview policy). Corporate recruiters and MBA
admission consultants generally say Kellogg grads are simply nice,
certainly among the most open, accessible and damn pleasant MBA
students in the world.
Facilities: The critics will tell you that Chicagos new, modern
business school complex looks and feels more like a shopping mall
than an educational environment. But this spacious and attractive
building, called the Charles M. Harper Center after the retired CEO
of ConAgra Foods, is a world-class MBA facility. The $125 million
building, with 415,000 square feet, opened in 2004, replacing
classrooms and offices that had been scattered across four
traditional buildings. The center gave Chicago 60 percent more
space than it previously had. All 11 tiered-classrooms are
windowless and in the bottom of the building, while 31 group study
rooms, seminar rooms, and offices are upstairs. The Rothman Winter
Garden, a massive six-story glass atrium, is the schools piazza, an
impressive gathering space that is topped by curved steel beams
that mimic Gothic arches. It is the centerpiece of the building,
where the incoming 550 MBA students are welcomed by the dean each
year. There are 40 interview rooms for recruiters alone in the
facility, along with a recruters lounge that reaches outside onto a
patio, next to the deans office. The Kellogg School, in contrast,
is largely housed in two connected buildings built in 1972, Arthur
Andersen Hall and Leverone Hall. A six-story addtion was added to
the northeast of Andersen Hall in 2001. Now known as the Donald
Jacobs Center, its a compact and efficient facility that could use
more updating. A separate executive education facility, the James
Allen Center, is a short walk away on Lake Michigan.
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Chicago's Booth School of Business
Teaching Methods: At both schools, theres a fairly strong mix of
lectures, case studies, experiential learning and simulation. The
single biggest difference: collaborative team work. You would be
hard pressed to find a school that requires more work in different
teams across the entire two-year experience than Kellogg. Sure,
almost all the schools talk the teamwork and collaboration game
these days. But Kellogg was the first major business school to make
working in teams a core part of the MBA experience. It remains a
profound difference between Kellogg and Chicago. The average
Kellogg grad will have been in roughly 200 team meetings by the
time he or she graduates. Each student grades his fellow teammates
on most of the group work and those grades go to the professor so
there are no free rides. Some Kellogg grads actually think that the
school puts too much emphasis on teamwork and not enough on
independent thinking and study, but they tend to be in the
minority.
Program Focus: The most obvious difference is that Kellogg has
long been known as the business school for marketing, while Chicago
has long had a reputation for finance. Kellogg routinely comes in
first for marketing in numerous surveys and studies, while Chicago
often is ranked just below Wharton and sometimes Columbia in
finance. In U.S. News & World Reports latest survey of B-school
deans and directors, Kellogg takes first place in marketing
(Chicago is tied for sixth with Columbia), while Chicago is ranked
second in finance behind Wharton (Northwestern is tied for seventh
with Harvard, Berkeley and UCLA). Not surprisingly, Kellogg edges
out Chicago in general management where U.S. News ranks Kellogg
third behind only Harvard and Stanford (Chicago is ranked 11th).
Kellogg is also given the edge over Chicago in entrepreneurship
(11th vs. 14th), international business (13th vs. 17th), and
non-profit management (fourth) behind Yale, Berkeley and
Stanford).
Curriculum: Chicago has one of the most open and flexible
curriculums of any business school in the world. There is only one
required course for all MBA students: its Leadership Effectiveness
and Development, known as LEAD, a series of classes and exercises
on such core management skills as negotiation, team-building and
giving feedback. Other than that, each Chicago student choices what
courses to take and when to take them based on his or her
experience, previous education, and goals. So you dont have to sit
through elementary accounting or basic finance if you already have
an undergraduate background in them. The downside of this approach,
of course, is that there is relatively little bonding with your
incoming classmates, each of who has different class schedules. At
Kellogg, the incoming class is divided into cohorts of some 65
students, each dubbed a specific name, from Poets and Cash Cows to
Jive Turkeys and Bucket Heads. You can opt out of one of the nine
fundamental courses in the core and take a higher-level offering, a
so-called turbo class, but you pretty much move through the core
curriculum with your section. About half of Kelloggs students waive
at least one course. Both schools offerings are based on the
quarter system in which youll take between three and five courses
per quarter (with three quarters a year). Chicago requires a
minimum of 21 courses for graduation; Kellogg requires a minimum of
24.5 courses.
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Kellogg School of Management. Photo by John A. Byrne.
On-Campus Recruiting: Both Kellogg and Booth attract the top MBA
corporate recruiters in the world and, just as importantly, both
schools have best-in-class career services offices to help with job
searches. Pretty much any recruiter who comes to Chicago visits
both schoolsnot one or the other. So youre exposed to an amazing
array of world-class companies that actively recruit large numbers
of MBAs. The only key difference is that Chicago tends to be
stronger on the finance side (see table below for which companies
hired the most MBAs from Chicago and Northwestern), while Kellogg
has a very significant advantage on the consumer marketing side. As
much as half of Chicagos graduating MBAs often head for finance.
Before their collapse, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were both
among the largest recruiters at Chicago. In fact, in the year that
Lehman went bust, the investment banking firm hired more than 20
Chicago MBAs. Kellogg grads tend to go into more diverse fields.
They also seem to do very well with the top management consulting
firms, including McKinsey, Bain, BCG and Booz, probably because of
the high level of interpersonnel skills Kellogg MBAs are known for
thanks to those mandatory application interviews. The consulting
industry as a whole hired an astounding 38% of Kelloggs Class of
2009.
Alumni Network: Chicago probably has a clear and convincing edge
if you want to work in investment management, commercial banking,
or Wall Street. Its alums are all over the big firms and far more
concentrated as a force in finance than Kellogg grads. The downside
is that Chicago hasnt done all that much in the department of
bonding so that some grads have less affection for or loyalty to
the school as alums. Chicago has a global network of more than
42,000 alums (that number includes part-time and Executive MBAs) in
101 countries. The school claims 5,400 CEOs and top officers at
such companies as JPMorgan-Chase, ITT Industries, Pfizer, Gilette,
Suzuki and John Deere, as well as entrepreneurial alums who have
founded such companies as ZipCar, Harpoon Brewery, and Morningstar.
Even though these are schools with awesome international
reputations, the strength of their alumni networks is most apparent
in their home territory of Chicago. Booth, for example, claims
12,656 alums in the Windy City alone,
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compared with just 2,300 in New York, 782 in San Francisco, and
783 in Boston. Kellogg, meantime, has 22,438 alums (a number that
includes 3,315 who graduated from Kelloggs one-year program and 970
MMMs). Of the total, Kellogg says 4,862 live in chicago, 2,733 are
in New York, 1,955 are in the San Francisco Bay area, 300 in
London, and 175 in Paris. Kelloggs alums are chief executives of
Campbell Soup, T-Mobile, Mattel, Target, Allstate, Room to Read,
among other business and social enterprises.
Rankings:
In the latest rankings, Chicago has been beating Kellogg fairly
decisively across most of the major polls in recent years. Only
U.S. News & World Report has ranked Kellogg ahead of Chicago
and only by one position. That hasnt always been true. In fact,
Kellogg had regularly beaten Chicago for many years. No school, for
example, has been number one in the BusinessWeek rankings more
often than Kellogg which has had that honor for five of 11 times
over a 22-year period. Chicago has topped the BusinessWeek rankings
twice, the last two times under the leadership of Booth Dean Ted
Snyder who has now left the school for Yale. Kellogg has done very
poorly in the Financial Times and The Economist rankings, both of
which we give the least credibility. So these are clear anomalies.
The P&Q rankwhich factors into consideration all the major
rankings weighted by their individual authorityputs Kellogg at
number 7 and Booth at number three. These are the up-to-date
rankings from each ranking organization.
MBA Rankings KelloggBoothPoets & Quants 7 3 BusinessWeek 3 1
Forbes 8 4 U.S. News & World Report4 5 Financial Times 23 9 The
Economist 15 4
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Historical Rankings by BusinessWeek:
The most fascinating battle between two rival schools in any
survey has played out in the BusinessWeek ranking of both Kellogg
and Booth over the years. The Kellogg School has had the best of
this competition over the 22-year period of BusinessWeek rankings
as pointed out above. The beneficiaries, of course, are the
graduates of these two schools and the corporate recruiters who
continue to rate both institutions very highly. When BusinessWeek
began ranking business schools, Chicago debuted at number 11 while
Kellogg took top honors as number one. In the last BusinessWeek
survey in 2008, Chicago edged out Kellogg with a second consecutive
number one ranking, while Kellogg was number three. The recent
departure of Dean Ted Snyder at Chicago may not bode well for the
institution. Snyder was a master at managing customer satisfaction,
even putting the recruiters lounge next to his office.
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Kellogg Booth
1988 1 11
1990 1 4
1992 1 2
1994 2 3
1996 2 8
1998 2 3
2000 1 10
2002 1 2
2004 3 2
2006 3 1
2008 undefined 1
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Historical Rankings by The Financial Times:
Unlike BusinessWeeks rankings, The Financial Times includes
business schools from all over the world. So the FT is ranking both
Chicago and Northwestern against such places as London Business
School, which ranked number one in this survey in 2010 and 2009,
and INSEAD, which ranked fifth these last two years. Chicago is the
undisputed winner in this survey, besting Kellogg in all 11 years
charted below. Chicagos Booth best showing was in 2002 when the FT
ranked the school third. Its weakest outing? In 2009, when the FT
ranked Booth 11th, the only time it got a ranking outside the top
ten. Kellogg has especially turned in very weak performances in
recent years with its lowest FT rank ever in 2010 at number 22. We
wouldnt take this all too seriously: The FT survey has had some
head-scratching results over the years. Instituto de Empresa in
Spain, for example, is ranked the sixth best school in the world by
the newspaper. Eight years earlier, it was ranked 35th. Meantime,
Hong Kongs UST, ranked 9th by the Financial Times in 2010, had a
rank of 69 in 2004. These wild swings in the rankings undermine
their credibility and authority.
Booth Kellogg
2000 6 7
2001 4 9
2002 3 10
2003 5 9
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Booth Kellogg
2004 4 11
2005 6 11
2006 6 17
2007 6 19
2008 9 24
2009 11 21
2010 9 22
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Admissions:
Despite Kelloggs more recent fall in the rankings, it is
somewhat more selective than Chicagos Booth, accepting less than
20% of the applicants who apply to its full-time program. Booth, on
the other, accepts about a quarter of all its applicants. The
difference is largely due to the fact that Kellogg receives far
more applications every year than Booth: 5,545 applications for the
Class of 2011 versus 3,843 received by Booth. Its worth noting that
the average GMAT score for Kelloggs entire applicant pool is an
extraordinarily high 700. For admits to the Class of 2011 at
Kellogg, its 706eight points below Chicago which tends to get far
more quants than Kellogg. The GMAT ranges for each school is based
on the 80th percentile which is how both schools report the
data.
Admission Stats Kellogg Booth Average GMAT 706 714 GMAT Range
650-760660-760Average GPA 3.59 3.53 Selectivity 19.5% 24.8% Yield
NA NA
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Enrollment:
Both Kellogg and Booth are major MBA schools with very large
enrollments. Of the top business schools, only Harvard, Wharton and
Columbia have total full-time enrollments that exceed Northwestern
and Chicago. Once you add the sizable part-time MBA programs that
both Kellogg and Booth offer, these two institutions are even
larger than Harvard, Wharton and Columbia. In fact, theres only one
major school with a larger enrollment: New York Universitys Stern
School due to its massive part-time enrollment. Both Kellogg and
Booth enroll roughly the same number of full-time MBAs: Kelloggs
1,241 is just slightly larger than Booths 1,185. The numbers below
are for the Class of 2011.
Enrollment Stats KelloggBooth
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Total MBA Enrollment1,241 1,185 Women 33% 35% International 33%
35% Minority 22% 25%
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Poets & Quants:
The most surprising stat here is the small percentage of
students at Kellogg who have undergraduate degrees in the
humanities. At 18%, its almost the smallest of all the major
business schools. Thats a bit shocking due to the reputation that
Kellogg MBAs have for having high interpersonnel skills. Obviously,
the fact that Kellogg interviews all its applicants pays off. The
Booth number of humanities grads is likely an overestimate due to
the fact that Booth reports its number as liberal arts and others.
Both schools admit a very high percentage of applicants with
business or economics undergraduate degrees. At Booth, nearly half
of the Class of 2011 has one of those two degrees. At Kellogg, its
46%.
Undergrad DegreesKelloggBooth
Humanities 18% 33% Engineering/Math 35% 18% Business/Economics
46% 48%
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Jobs and Pay:
The severe recession of 2009 hit Northwestern and Chicago hard
as it did all the best business schools. Surprisingly given the
greater diversity of industries that tend to hire Kellogg grads,
however, Chicago seemed to fare slightly better. MBAs employed at
commencement at Booth were a full five percentage points higher
than those at Kellogg. Whats most surprising about that difference
is that Booth has historically placed a far higher percentage of
its grads in the especially hard-hit finance field. Even so,
Kellogg MBAs tended to get higher starting salaries and bonusesmore
than $5,000 each on averageand they tend to be better paid
throughout their careers. The estimates of median pay over both 20
years and a full career come from a study by PayScale done for
BusinessWeek and do not include stock options or equity stakes by
entrepreneurs.
Job & Pay Data Kellogg Booth Starting salary & bonus
$127,834 $122,131 MBAs employed at commencement 68.1% 73.2% MBAs
employed 3 months after commencement 79.5% 81.7% Estimated median
pay & bonus in 20th year $190,000 $184,000 Estimated median pay
& bonus over a full career$3,085,680$2,970,437
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Who Hires Who:
Big prestigious companies come to both Booth and Kellogg to hire
graduates. But as the table below reveals, Booth MBAs get far more
jobs in finance than those from Kellogg. Kellogg, on the other
hand, does exceptionally well in management consulting and consumer
marketing companies. In the latest year for which this data is
available, for the Class of 2009, McKinsey hired more Kellogg grads
than Booth MBAs. So did Boston Consulting Group by a dramatic 23 to
9 difference, along with Deloitte, Monitor Group, Booz & Co.,
and A.T. Kearney. Consumer marketing giants such as Johnson &
Johnson, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kraft Foods, and Samsung were big
hirers at Kellogg and relative no-shows at Booth. But the finance
giants greatly offset that difference at Booth with Credit Suisse,
Bank of America, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank, taking double-digit
numbers of Booth grads. Bottom line: If you want a job in finance,
Chicagos a good place to be. If you want a job in consulting or
marketing, Kellogg is a great choice. NA does not necessarily mean
that a company didnt hire any graduates from the school, but rather
that the number of grads it did hire was fewer than four.
Hiring Company Number of Hires
at Booth
Number of Hires
at Kellogg McKinsey & Co. 23 26 Bain & Co. 16 13 Credit
Suisse 15 5 BofA/Merrill Lynch 13 NA Citigroup 12 NA Deutsche Bank
12 NA Barclays 10 4 Johnson & Johnson NA 10 JP Morgan Chase 10
NA Boston Consulting Group9 23 Deloitte 7 11 General Mills NA 6
Accenture 6 NA Monitor Group NA 6 Booz & Co. 6 9 A.T. Kearney
NA 5 PepsiCo Chicago NA 5 Morgan Stanley 5 NA Dow Chemical 5 NA
Chevron Corp. NA 4 Kraft Foods Global NA 4 Samsung Group NA 4
Baxter International 4 NA Exxon Mobil 4 NA United Air Lines 4
NA
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