MBA applicants can get carried away with rankings. In this series, we profile amazing programs at business schools that are typically ranked outside the top 15.
Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, may be small, with more than 2,000 undergraduates and approximately 400 full-time MBA students at its F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, but it has built an outstanding reputation for entrepreneurship that far exceeds its size. Babson has been ranked number one in entrepreneurial education for more than 20 consecutive years by U.S. News & World Report and as one of the top business schools for MBA pay by Bloomberg Businessweek, in addition to being described as an “entrepreneurial powerhouse” by Forbes. The school is home to the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship, named in honor of the co-founder of Home Depot who is also a Babson alumnus. The center offers various resources for students looking to start their own businesses, including the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Practices Project, and the John E. and Alice L. Butler Venture Accelerator Program. As part of their hiring requirements, each member of Babson’s faculty must have firsthand entrepreneurial experience, offering students a cross-disciplinary curriculum based on real-world business decision making. Babson’s Signature Learning Experiences, for example, give students the opportunity to develop hands-on entrepreneurial skills by testing ideas and formulating business models.