How We Rank Online MBA Programs

Who Is Ranked

The field starts from AACSB's list of accredited business schools, retrieved September 21, 2026. It names 557 schools in the United States, and each reports its degree programs to AACSB with their delivery mode, tuition and format. A school is included when it reports at least one MBA that can be completed fully online. Executive MBAs and dual degrees, such as an MBA paired with a law or nursing degree, are left out, because they are different products for different readers. Three schools that AACSB lists with a fully online MBA were removed because the school's own current page says otherwise: at two the MBA open to U.S. students is hybrid, mixing online and in-person classes, and at one the online MBA has been replaced by a program that has not opened yet. The school's page wins over the directory. That leaves 327 schools.

AACSB accreditation is therefore a condition of entry, not a score. Every ranked program is at an AACSB-accredited business school, which is the benchmark employers and doctoral programs use in business education.

Matching Each School To Its Federal Records

AACSB publishes no federal identifier, so each school is matched to IPEDS by name and state. 265 schools match exactly, and the other 62 were matched by hand, each with a recorded reason. Near misses were never accepted automatically: the closest name in the same state is sometimes a different institution, such as SUNY Buffalo State University for the University at Buffalo.

Some universities report to IPEDS as several units, such as a main campus and an online campus. College Scorecard reports earnings and debt for the whole family of units that share a federal aid identifier, so the unit a school is matched to does not change its figures; 10 schools here are multi-unit families.

The Two Factors

Graduate earnings, 55%

Median earnings of the school's business master's graduates one year after finishing, scored by where each program sits among all ranked programs. It counts graduates who received federal student aid and were working and not enrolled, covers every business master's the school confers in that field (not only the online MBA), and reflects the experience students bring as well as what the program adds. Source: U.S. Department of Education, College Scorecard, field-of-study data.

Tuition, 45%

The whole-program tuition the school reports to AACSB for its online MBA, scored so the least expensive program scores highest. The out-of-state figure is used, because an online student usually lives somewhere other than the school's state; where a school reports a range, the top of the range is used. Source: AACSB's list of accredited schools.

How Scores Are Computed

Each factor is scored by percentile among the ranked programs, so a program at the middle of the field on earnings scores 5 of 10 on that factor. The two factor scores are combined by weight into a score out of 100.

A program needs both factors to be ranked: earnings and tuition. Nothing is estimated or reweighted around a missing figure. Of the 41 schools listed without a rank, 35 have no Scorecard earnings figure for their business master's graduates, which Scorecard withholds when the group is too small to report, and 7 report no tuition to AACSB.

Ties on score are broken by higher earnings, then lower tuition, then name, so the order never depends on the order of a data file.

What The Tuition Figure Is

Tuition is the whole-program figure each school reports to AACSB. Schools update it on their own schedule and some exclude fees, so it can trail the price on the school's own site: Illinois reports $24,984 to AACSB for the iMBA, and its program page lists $27,288 in total tuition and fees. Use it to compare programs, and confirm the current price with the school.

Where a school reports several online MBA tracks at different prices, the general MBA's price is used. Where it reports a range rather than one figure, the top of the range is scored and the range is shown; 14 ranked programs report a range. The Illinois comparison above is from the Gies College of Business iMBA page, read on September 21, 2026.

What The Earnings Figure Is

Earnings are College Scorecard's median for the school's business master's graduates who finished in 2018-19 or 2019-20, measured one year later and expressed in 2022 dollars. They include every business master's the school files in that field, campus and online, and only graduates who received federal aid.

Scorecard reports business master's degrees in two fields: 52.02, Business Administration, Management and Operations, and 52.01, Business and Commerce, General. Schools file the MBA under either. Each school is scored on the field in which it conferred more master's degrees in 2022-23, and the other field is never borrowed when that one is withheld, because it may be a different degree. 257 ranked schools are scored on 52.02 and 29 on 52.01.

What The Ranking Leaves Out

• Graduation rate. IPEDS publishes completion only for first-time, full-time undergraduates. It says nothing about how many MBA students finish.
• Selectivity. The admission rate IPEDS reports is the university's undergraduate rate. MBA admissions are run by the business school against different criteria.
• Program size. Schools file the MBA under different federal program codes, so the completion counts measure filing habits more than programs. Carnegie Mellon's, for one, shows no business master's completions in either field the MBA is usually filed under.
• Undergraduate tuition. It is the only tuition figure in the federal data and it is not what an MBA costs. Tuition here is what each school reports to AACSB for the online MBA.

Program Summaries

The summaries on program cards, 143 of them, are written from each school's own online MBA page, which every card links with the date it was read. Each fact in a summary is backed by a sentence copied word for word from that page, and a script re-fetches the pages before publishing and flags any of those sentences that can no longer be found. Rankings, salary claims, testimonials and prices on school pages are not carried over, and where a school's pages contradict each other, the contested claim is left out.

State And Concentration Pages

State and concentration pages filter the national ranking; they do not re-score it. A state gets a page when at least 8 of its programs are ranked, which is true of 17 states. A concentration gets a page when at least 14 ranked programs report it to AACSB, which is true of 10. Concentrations are read from the program names schools report to AACSB, where each online MBA row names a discipline, and similar disciplines are grouped under one label: "Data Analytics" and "Quantitative Methods" under business analytics, for example. Where a school's own page lists its online MBA concentrations in full and a concentration it reports to AACSB is not among them, the school's page wins: 19 listings were removed that way.

Changes To The Model

The version number and date above change whenever a weight, a factor or an eligibility rule changes. Corrections to a school's data change its score without changing the model.