The Wall Street Journal ranked the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School 8th in its national ranking of MBA programs based on surveys of corporate recruiters. The school moved up a spot from last year’s ranking.

UNC Kenan-Flagler also was ranked highly for academic excellence, with rankings of 7th in social responsibility and 8th in marketing. By industry, recruiters in health care products and services ranked UNC Kenan-Flagler 2nd, and recruiters in financial services ranked it 9th.

"This ranking is a vote of confidence from an important constituency: the recruiters who hire our graduates," said Dean Steve Jones. "They have told us that they value the strong and well-rounded leaders who graduate from UNC Kenan-Flagler. We will continue to focus on preparing our graduates for career success through our innovative leadership and communication programs. We are gratified to see that work recognized with this ranking."

Jones praised the "Career Management Center (CMC), the entire MBA Program team, Associate Dean Valarie Zeithaml, our dedicated faculty and, of course, our students, who recruiters clearly value as leaders who deliver results."

"The CMC, the Career Clubs and individual students work hard to provide exceptional customer service to our recruiters and work with them as partners throughout the recruiting process," he said.

The ranking is based on how recruiters rated each school on 21 attributes; recruiters’ future plans to recruit at the schools and the number of recruiters who said they had recruited recently at the schools. Among the attributes measured were:

• Ability to work well within a team
• Personal ethics and integrity
• Analytical and problem-solving skills
• Work ethic
• Fit with the corporate culture
• Leadership potential
• Strategic thinking
• Well-rounded
• Content of the core curriculum
• Incorporates experiential learning into the curriculum
• Career-services office
• Faculty expertise

The Wall Street Journal published rankings of national schools (see below), regional schools and international schools, all of which can be found at http://www.careerjournal.com/reports/bschool06/.

2006 RANK - 2005 RANK  - UNIVERSITY (BUSINESS SCHOOL)

1                       2                 University of Michigan (Ross)

2                       1                 Dartmouth College (Tuck)

3                       3                 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)

4                       8                 Columbia University

5                       7                 University of California, Berkeley (Haas)

6                       4                 Northwestern University (Kellogg)

7                       6                 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

8                       9                 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)

9                       5                 Yale University

10                   12                 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)

11                   13                 University of Chicago

12                   17                 Duke University (Fuqua)

13                   11                 University of Virginia (Darden)

14                   14                 Harvard University

15                   10                 University of Southern California (Marshall)

16                   18                 Cornell University (Johnson)

17                   16                 New York University (Stern)

18                   15                 Stanford University

19                   19                 University of California, Los Angeles (Anderson)