Courtesy by Chenli Ye/The Ram Gabelli is now ranked 40th in Businessweek, an increase of nine places.
BY KELLY KULTYS
Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business (GSB) jumped nine places from 49th to 40th, according to Bloomberg’s Businessweek rankings, released on March 21. The rankings are published annually to rate undergraduate business schools according to different areas including faculty, employers and internship work.
“I was very pleased,” John Mantia, GSB ’13, vice president of GSB for the United Student Government (USG), said. “We ranked in the top 10 particularly on the employment side. I really like the stats talking about the employment because while the other stuff is nice, placing students and landing a lot of students in good paying jobs is really good for Fordham.”
According to an article on GabelliConnect, Donna Rappacioli, dean of GSB, said that this is another step in the right direction for the business school as the “ranking is a welcome recognition of the school’s strengths.”
Rappacioli also said that GSB is currently looking to meet its goals in four main areas: “academic innovation, global education, personal and professional development and teaching quality.”
“I know the deans were really happy with it [since] the ranking is a big point of pride,” Mantia said. “It shows we’re more competitive and people are starting to realize the value invested. We’re not as undervalued as we used to be.”
The rankings are comprised of many different areas, including senior satisfaction surveys, which require a certain number of responses from students for the business school to qualify for the rankings.
Over 20 schools were nominated for rankings, but not ranked because too few of their seniors filled out the required survey. Fordham, at first, did not have a large student response to the survey.
“I think that the issue at first was senior laziness, but once we realized how important the survey was, there was a large movement [especially] from senior management being like ‘do the survey,’” Mantia said. “Our participation was, I believe, 40 percent, and the threshold was 32. Eventually, we were well over.”
They also include employer opinion, median salary, number of undergraduates pursuing their Masters in Business Administration (MBA) and academic quality, which is comprised of student-to-faculty ratios, average SAT scores and internship percentages.
The rankings considered many factors, including that 87.7 percent of GSB students have internships. They reported that Fordham had a 91 percent job placement for undergraduates and had an average starting salary of $57,500.
Many top employers of GSB graduates include JP Morgan Chase, Ernst & Young and KPMG.
The Businessweek rankings, do not just include data gathered from this academic year but also take into consideration the ranking the school achieved in previous years.
“The way they weighted [the ranking] is such that it implied a ranking of 28 for us for this year,” Mantia said. “In prior years, we were at 49 and 52, which are each weighted at 25 percent, so when you [count] that we’re at 40.”
Students in the business school hope that this trend will continue in the future, especially with the construction of new facilities on campus and the implementation of new programs providing students with more networking opportunities and experiences abroad.
“I would expect that in future years our ranking will continue to go up from that 40,” Mantia said. “I would expect [the ranking] to continue to improve particularly because of the opening of Hughes Hall.”
