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News Release

Last modified: Friday, February 29, 2008

IU's Kelley School of Business rises "Business Week" rankings

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Feb. 29, 2008

Editors: For further assistance today, George Vlahakis also can be reached at 812-345-1500.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University's Kelley School of Business continues to be ranked among the nation's elite, advancing two places from 18th to16th and second among Big Ten schools in Business Week magazine's new rankings of undergraduate business programs.

Business Week, which announced its third ranking of undergraduate business programs through a Web-cast late Thursday (Feb. 28), also said that Kelley was once again ranked sixth among all public universities. Kelley maintained its "A-plus" grade for its career services operations and received an "A" grade for teaching quality. The school was ranked ninth overall based on the student satisfaction component of the survey and 14th based on input by corporate recruiters.

"Students Say: Integrative curriculum, combining finance, marketing, strategy, and operations, get raves," the magazine's editors wrote in a brief recap of the program.

Kelley's undergraduate program was ranked 18th a year ago. In the most recent ranking of MBA programs, Business Week also ranked Kelley's MBA program 18th.

"There are over 3,000 colleges and universities in the United States that offer business programs. Among them, only about 600 programs are accredited. To rank 16th among them, sixth among public universities and second in the Big Ten places us in very select company. We're in the top 1 percent overall and top 3 percent of nationally accredited programs," said Dan Smith, dean of the Kelley School.

"Companies and our students each tell us that we are providing a world-class educational experience," Smith added. "We have worked very hard to improve our faculty-student ratio in order to provide more personal attention to students, both inside and outside the classroom. Greater emphasis on experiential learning helps to build students' skills in dealing with unstructured problems and as a result, gives them a wider range of career opportunities.

"Employers have endorsed our approach to learning, as evidenced by the fact that more than 90 percent of our students have job offers before graduation."

The school has a 98 percent graduation rate.

M.A. Venkataramanan, chair of undergraduate programs in the Kelley School and the Lawrence D. Glaubinger professor of business administration, noted that more than 400 companies came to campus this year and conducted more than 12,000 interviews. As a result, the median starting salary for Kelley students went up by 10 percent, or $4,000, this past year.

In the online chat announcing the rankings, Geoff Gloeckler, staff editor for Business Week, said, "For the most part, students seemed happy with recruiting, and I think the starting salary numbers are a big reason for this. At the top 25 schools, the average starting salary went up $3,000 to $54,445. Not bad at all."

Kelley continues to attract top students, as well. The average SAT score of a Kelley student has risen by 75 points in the last two years to 1,253.

Other Indiana schools were included in the rankings. The University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, a private school, was ranked third and Purdue University was ranked 62nd this year.

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