Kat Gore
Special to Mustang News
Cal Poly’s Orfalea College of Business took 70th place in Bloomberg Businessweek’s ninth annual ranking of the best U.S. undergraduate business schools, according to an April 7 press release.
“This marks the sixth consecutive year the college has been included in the list of 132 U.S. undergraduate business programs,” the release said.
Cal Poly was one of four public universities in California to make the list, in addition to the four private California universities.
“Obviously, we are thrilled to be included,” Interim Dean Doug Cerf said.
According to Cerf, the ranking results provides a signal to stakeholders who do not have the opportunity to observe the college in a direct way.
“It’s nice to be able to produce a signal more broadly than you can person-by-person,” Cerf said.
Bloomberg Businessweek Business Education Editor Francesca Levy said the list ranks business schools on five measures: academic quality, student opinion of the school experience, what employers think of the school’s graduates, the number of graduates going into elite MBA programs and the median starting salary for graduates.
“Schools that rank highly overall do so because they’ve scored well on a number of those categories,” Levy said.
Bloomberg Businessweek starts out with a list that includes any U.S. school offering a business degree that has asked to be considered for ranking, or that has been eligible in the past.
“The schools on that list that make it into the ranking must get a sufficient response to our survey of students, receive a certain number of mentions by employers and give us the data required to rank them,” Levy said.
The fact that Cal Poly was ranked for six years means it has been in that pool and met all of those criteria for each of those years, Levy said.
Economics freshman Jasmine Elliot said she thinks the college got its high rating because the business school works hard to provide resources such as clubs, speakers and advisers to make the students successful.
“I think it’s great that we were ranked in the top 100, and hopefully we can continue to improve and rank even higher,” Elliot said.
Cerf said the college continues to work on and improve its programs.
“We will continue to strive to do better,” Cerf said.