Forbes has ranked the MBA Program at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School No. 15 in its ranking of U.S. business schools.

This sixth biennial ranking is based on based on Forbes’ calculation of return on investment (ROI), which:

• Compared earnings in the first 5 years out of school to the opportunity cost (2 years of forgone compensation, tuition and required fees)
• Adjusted for cost of living expenses
• Discounted earnings gains using a rate tied to money market yields
• Discounted tuition to account for students who pay in-state rates and for the non-repayable financial aid from schools
• For the first time, accounted for required fees that students must pay on top of tuition

Forbes.com features UNC Kenan-Flagler at http://tinyurl.com/kwvyst

Forbes also ranked UNC Kenan-Flagler No. 15 in 2007.

This year Forbes surveyed 17,000 alumni from the classes of 2004 at 103 schools; 24 percent responded. It ranked U.S. and non-U.S. programs (one-year and two-year programs). The lists are at http://tinyurl.com/lffral. See its top 30 U.S. programs below.

Forbes’ 2009 ranking of top U.S. MBA programs

1. Stanford
2. Dartmouth (Tuck)
3. Harvard
4. Chicago (Booth)
5. Pennsylvania (Wharton)
6. Columbia
7. Cornell (Johnson)
8. Northwestern (Kellogg)
9. Virginia (Darden)
10. Yale
11. Texas-Austin (McCombs)
12. UC Berkeley (Haas)
13. Duke (Fuqua)
14. MIT (Sloan)
15. UNC (Kenan-Flagler)
16. Brigham Young (Marriott)
17. NYU (Stern)
18. Michigan (Ross)
19. UCLA (Anderson)
20. Iowa (Tippie)
21. Michigan State (Broad)
22. Emory (Goizueta)
23. Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
24. Texas A&M (Mays)
25. Indiana (Kelley)
26. Minnesota (Carlson)
27. Connecticut
28. Penn State (Smeal)
29. Maryland (Smith)
30. Vanderbilt (Owen)