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.
Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business may rival MIT Sloan and Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School with respect to its focus on the direct application of Internet technology to global business problems. The school’s rather small (the Class of 2014 has just 71 students) and innovation-focused program is nevertheless ranked 23rd among full-time MBA programs and 23rd for return on investment worldwide by Bloomberg Businessweek.
Situated in the heart of Technology Square in Midtown Atlanta, Scheller offers students numerous networking and innovation resources within the city’s high-tech business community, including the Advanced Technology Development Center business incubator. Billing itself on its Web site as “the nation’s largest and most comprehensive university-based program of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization, and economic development,” the Enterprise Innovation Institute, or EI2, also provides students with resources for career options at the intersection of business and technology. As an indicator of the school’s overall strengths in information technology and operations management, a large portion of Scheller’s study body comes from engineering and tech backgrounds (53% of the Class of 2014).
