Chicagos Booth vs.

Northwesterns Kellogg School

by John A. Byrne

The central piazza of the new Harper Center at Chicago's Booth School of Business. Photo by
John A. Byrne
Outside of Boston, which can boast Harvard and MIT, theres pretty much only one other major
city in the world that can lay claim to a pair of world-class graduate schools of business:
Chicago. Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management and the University of
Chicagos Booth School of Business are close to each other in several respects. Their full-time
MBA enrollments are roughly the same size, while they both offer sizable part-time and EMBA
programs as well. Both schools also frequently rank rank near each other in some of the most
influential rankings. On the other hand, these are two vastly different schools in their approach to
business education. Historically, Chicago has been a quant school that has placed nearly half of
its graduates in finance jobs. Kellogg is a general management school, with a strong reputation
for marketing. These two schools are highly competitive with each other. When Kellogg MBAs
won a Real Estate Challenge competition against their Booth counterparts in June of 2010,
Kellogg actually issued a press release on the victory, noting that Kellogg had beaten Booth for
the second year in a row. One other similarity? Both schools have new deans. Kellogg is now led
by Sally Blount, who had been dean of New York Universitys undergraduate business program,
while Booths new leader is Sunil Kumar, who had been an operations professor and associate
dean for academic affairs at Stanfords Graduate School of Business. In some ways, Kumar has
the tougher job because he has taken over from a highly popular dean in Ted Snyder who
championed more progress at Chicago than any leader in recent memory.
The most dramatic differences between these two MBA educational giants?
Geography: Youd think that the University of Chicago would be in the center of Chicago. It
isnt. Its in Hyde Park, about a 20-minute train ride to the edge of Chicagos downtown. Public
transporation isnt ideal, and a crime-infested neighborhood separates the campus from
downtown Chicago. Nonetheless, Hyde Parkwhere President Obama used to liveis a pretty and
relatively comfortable place. Kellogg is in Evanston, Ill., about a 30-minute train ride into the
heart of Chicago. It has the look and feel of a typical university town such as Ann Arbor, Mich.,
or Madison, Wis. In either case, you have immediate and quick access to one of Americas
greatest cities. As the third largest city in America, Chicago is an exciting place to be, with a
thriving music scene, first-class restaurants and bars, and awesome cultural attractions, including
the worlds second largest art museum, the Art Institute. Its a gorgeous place, with 31 miles of
lakefront, including nearly 19 miles of bike paths and 33 beaches. The one very big downside:
the winters can be absolutely brutal.
Size: Chicago and Northwestern have the largest MBA programs in the world. Chicago has a
full-time MBA enrollment of 1,185 students, while Kellogg is slighly larger, with 1,241. At
either place, theres a lot going on, from part-time MBA and Executive MBA programs to
significant executive education programming. Indeed, Chicago has more part-time students
(1,700) than it has full-time students. Chicago, in fact, offers five full-time and part-time MBA
programs, including EMBA programs in Chicago, London, and Singapore, as well as evening
MBA and weekend MBA programs in downtown Chicago at its Gleacher Center. Then, theres a
PhD program with about 130 students. Kelloggs offerings are just as broad: With 1,100 part-
time MBA students, the school has both week night and Saturday part-time programs in Wiebolt
Hall in downtown Chicago as well as Evanston, along with three different EMBAs, including a
program in Miami, Fla., and an equally large PhD program. What all this means is that at both
Chicago and Kellogg the faculty is spread awfully thin because its stretched across all of these
obligations.

Kellogg's Don Jacobs Center at Northwestern University. Photo by John A. Byrne
Culture: For years, Chicago was known as a haven of sorts for quant jocks. By and large, the
finance geeks dominated the student culture, while a formidable and highly acclaimed faculty
ruled the academic roost. Its not that Chicago is all about finance and numbers, says Sarah
McGinty, a member of the Class of 2010. Its about thinking quantitatively, not being
quantitative. Departing Dean Ted Snyder has noted that the faculty culture collided with the
MBA culture. The result: a great business school noted for its academic rigor (six present and
former Nobel Prize winners) and some of the most distinguished professors in the business but
little sense of true community. Some of this has changed somewhat over the years, particularly
with the opening of the Harper Center. But the school purposely lacks core cohort groups and
has no residence halls for its MBAs, factors that make it harder for real community to occur.
Some Chicago students say the school still lacks the camaraderie youll find at many other b-
schools, especially Kellogg, and that some students graduate from Chicago with only a handful
of people they would call friends. Kellogg, on the other hand, has a strong student culture of
involvement and collaboration. Despite its much larger size, Kellogg has managed to create a
smart and down-to-earth community that is nearly as close-knit as Stanford or Dartmouth. There
are many reasons for this difference but probably the most influential one is the fact that Kellogg
interviews every single applicant. The result: the interpersonnel skills of Kellogg students are
extremely high and get greater attention here than Chicago or many other schools. Put highly
intelligent, yet friendly and outgoing people together, and youre going to get a strong culture
that approximates a sense of family. It was and still is a big part of the secret of Kelloggs
success (See profile on and video interview of legendary Kellogg Dean Don Jacobs for more
insight into the interview policy). Corporate recruiters and MBA admission consultants generally
say Kellogg grads are simply nice, certainly among the most open, accessible and damn
pleasant MBA students in the world.
Facilities: The critics will tell you that Chicagos new, modern business school complex looks
and feels more like a shopping mall than an educational environment. But this spacious and
attractive building, called the Charles M. Harper Center after the retired CEO of ConAgra Foods,
is a world-class MBA facility. The $125 million building, with 415,000 square feet, opened in
2004, replacing classrooms and offices that had been scattered across four traditional buildings.
The center gave Chicago 60 percent more space than it previously had. All 11 tiered-classrooms
are windowless and in the bottom of the building, while 31 group study rooms, seminar rooms,
and offices are upstairs. The Rothman Winter Garden, a massive six-story glass atrium, is the
schools piazza, an impressive gathering space that is topped by curved steel beams that mimic
Gothic arches. It is the centerpiece of the building, where the incoming 550 MBA students are
welcomed by the dean each year. There are 40 interview rooms for recruiters alone in the
facility, along with a recruters lounge that reaches outside onto a patio, next to the deans office.
The Kellogg School, in contrast, is largely housed in two connected buildings built in 1972,
Arthur Andersen Hall and Leverone Hall. A six-story addtion was added to the northeast of
Andersen Hall in 2001. Now known as the Donald Jacobs Center, its a compact and efficient
facility that could use more updating. A separate executive education facility, the James Allen
Center, is a short walk away on Lake Michigan.

Chicago's Booth School of Business
Teaching Methods: At both schools, theres a fairly strong mix of lectures, case studies,
experiential learning and simulation. The single biggest difference: collaborative team work.
You would be hard pressed to find a school that requires more work in different teams across the
entire two-year experience than Kellogg. Sure, almost all the schools talk the teamwork and
collaboration game these days. But Kellogg was the first major business school to make working
in teams a core part of the MBA experience. It remains a profound difference between Kellogg
and Chicago. The average Kellogg grad will have been in roughly 200 team meetings by the time
he or she graduates. Each student grades his fellow teammates on most of the group work and
those grades go to the professor so there are no free rides. Some Kellogg grads actually think that
the school puts too much emphasis on teamwork and not enough on independent thinking and
study, but they tend to be in the minority.
Program Focus: The most obvious difference is that Kellogg has long been known as the
business school for marketing, while Chicago has long had a reputation for finance. Kellogg
routinely comes in first for marketing in numerous surveys and studies, while Chicago often is
ranked just below Wharton and sometimes Columbia in finance. In U.S. News & World Reports
latest survey of B-school deans and directors, Kellogg takes first place in marketing (Chicago is
tied for sixth with Columbia), while Chicago is ranked second in finance behind Wharton
(Northwestern is tied for seventh with Harvard, Berkeley and UCLA). Not surprisingly, Kellogg
edges out Chicago in general management where U.S. News ranks Kellogg third behind only
Harvard and Stanford (Chicago is ranked 11th). Kellogg is also given the edge over Chicago in
entrepreneurship (11th vs. 14th), international business (13th vs. 17th), and non-profit
management (fourth) behind Yale, Berkeley and Stanford).
Curriculum: Chicago has one of the most open and flexible curriculums of any business school
in the world. There is only one required course for all MBA students: its Leadership
Effectiveness and Development, known as LEAD, a series of classes and exercises on such core
management skills as negotiation, team-building and giving feedback. Other than that, each
Chicago student choices what courses to take and when to take them based on his or her
experience, previous education, and goals. So you dont have to sit through elementary
accounting or basic finance if you already have an undergraduate background in them. The
downside of this approach, of course, is that there is relatively little bonding with your incoming
classmates, each of who has different class schedules. At Kellogg, the incoming class is divided
into cohorts of some 65 students, each dubbed a specific name, from Poets and Cash Cows
to Jive Turkeys and Bucket Heads. You can opt out of one of the nine fundamental courses
in the core and take a higher-level offering, a so-called turbo class, but you pretty much move
through the core curriculum with your section. About half of Kelloggs students waive at least
one course. Both schools offerings are based on the quarter system in which youll take between
three and five courses per quarter (with three quarters a year). Chicago requires a minimum of 21
courses for graduation; Kellogg requires a minimum of 24.5 courses.

Kellogg School of Management. Photo by John A. Byrne.
On-Campus Recruiting: Both Kellogg and Booth attract the top MBA corporate recruiters in
the world and, just as importantly, both schools have best-in-class career services offices to help
with job searches. Pretty much any recruiter who comes to Chicago visits both schoolsnot one
or the other. So youre exposed to an amazing array of world-class companies that actively
recruit large numbers of MBAs. The only key difference is that Chicago tends to be stronger on
the finance side (see table below for which companies hired the most MBAs from Chicago and
Northwestern), while Kellogg has a very significant advantage on the consumer marketing side.
As much as half of Chicagos graduating MBAs often head for finance. Before their collapse,
Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were both among the largest recruiters at Chicago. In fact,
in the year that Lehman went bust, the investment banking firm hired more than 20 Chicago
MBAs. Kellogg grads tend to go into more diverse fields. They also seem to do very well with
the top management consulting firms, including McKinsey, Bain, BCG and Booz, probably
because of the high level of interpersonnel skills Kellogg MBAs are known for thanks to those
mandatory application interviews. The consulting industry as a whole hired an astounding 38%
of Kelloggs Class of 2009.
Alumni Network: Chicago probably has a clear and convincing edge if you want to work in
investment management, commercial banking, or Wall Street. Its alums are all over the big firms
and far more concentrated as a force in finance than Kellogg grads. The downside is that
Chicago hasnt done all that much in the department of bonding so that some grads have less
affection for or loyalty to the school as alums. Chicago has a global network of more than 42,000
alums (that number includes part-time and Executive MBAs) in 101 countries. The school claims
5,400 CEOs and top officers at such companies as JPMorgan-Chase, ITT Industries, Pfizer,
Gilette, Suzuki and John Deere, as well as entrepreneurial alums who have founded such
companies as ZipCar, Harpoon Brewery, and Morningstar. Even though these are schools with
awesome international reputations, the strength of their alumni networks is most apparent in their
home territory of Chicago. Booth, for example, claims 12,656 alums in the Windy City alone,
compared with just 2,300 in New York, 782 in San Francisco, and 783 in Boston. Kellogg,
meantime, has 22,438 alums (a number that includes 3,315 who graduated from Kelloggs one-
year program and 970 MMMs). Of the total, Kellogg says 4,862 live in chicago, 2,733 are in
New York, 1,955 are in the San Francisco Bay area, 300 in London, and 175 in Paris. Kelloggs
alums are chief executives of Campbell Soup, T-Mobile, Mattel, Target, Allstate, Room to
Read, among other business and social enterprises.
Rankings:
In the latest rankings, Chicago has been beating Kellogg fairly decisively across most of the
major polls in recent years. Only U.S. News & World Report has ranked Kellogg ahead of
Chicago and only by one position. That hasnt always been true. In fact, Kellogg had regularly
beaten Chicago for many years. No school, for example, has been number one in the
BusinessWeek rankings more often than Kellogg which has had that honor for five of 11 times
over a 22-year period. Chicago has topped the BusinessWeek rankings twice, the last two times
under the leadership of Booth Dean Ted Snyder who has now left the school for Yale. Kellogg
has done very poorly in the Financial Times and The Economist rankings, both of which we give
the least credibility. So these are clear anomalies. The P&Q rankwhich factors into
consideration all the major rankings weighted by their individual authorityputs Kellogg at
number 7 and Booth at number three. These are the up-to-date rankings from each ranking
organization.
MBA Rankings KelloggBooth
Poets & Quants 7 3
BusinessWeek 3 1
Forbes 8 4
U.S. News & World Report4 5
Financial Times 23 9
The Economist 15 4
.
Historical Rankings by BusinessWeek:
The most fascinating battle between two rival schools in any survey has played out in the
BusinessWeek ranking of both Kellogg and Booth over the years. The Kellogg School has had
the best of this competition over the 22-year period of BusinessWeek rankings as pointed out
above. The beneficiaries, of course, are the graduates of these two schools and the corporate
recruiters who continue to rate both institutions very highly. When BusinessWeek began ranking
business schools, Chicago debuted at number 11 while Kellogg took top honors as number one.
In the last BusinessWeek survey in 2008, Chicago edged out Kellogg with a second consecutive
number one ranking, while Kellogg was number three. The recent departure of Dean Ted Snyder
at Chicago may not bode well for the institution. Snyder was a master at managing customer
satisfaction, even putting the recruiters lounge next to his office.




Kellogg Booth

1988 1 11
1990 1 4
1992 1 2
1994 2 3
1996 2 8
1998 2 3
2000 1 10
2002 1 2
2004 3 2
2006 3 1
2008 undefined 1
.
Historical Rankings by The Financial Times:
Unlike BusinessWeeks rankings, The Financial Times includes business schools from all over
the world. So the FT is ranking both Chicago and Northwestern against such places as London
Business School, which ranked number one in this survey in 2010 and 2009, and INSEAD,
which ranked fifth these last two years. Chicago is the undisputed winner in this survey, besting
Kellogg in all 11 years charted below. Chicagos Booth best showing was in 2002 when the FT
ranked the school third. Its weakest outing? In 2009, when the FT ranked Booth 11th, the only
time it got a ranking outside the top ten. Kellogg has especially turned in very weak
performances in recent years with its lowest FT rank ever in 2010 at number 22. We wouldnt
take this all too seriously: The FT survey has had some head-scratching results over the years.
Instituto de Empresa in Spain, for example, is ranked the sixth best school in the world by the
newspaper. Eight years earlier, it was ranked 35th. Meantime, Hong Kongs UST, ranked 9th by
the Financial Times in 2010, had a rank of 69 in 2004. These wild swings in the rankings
undermine their credibility and authority.




Booth Kellogg

2000 6 7
2001 4 9
2002 3 10
2003 5 9

Booth Kellogg

2004 4 11
2005 6 11
2006 6 17
2007 6 19
2008 9 24
2009 11 21
2010 9 22
.
Admissions:
Despite Kelloggs more recent fall in the rankings, it is somewhat more selective than Chicagos
Booth, accepting less than 20% of the applicants who apply to its full-time program. Booth, on
the other, accepts about a quarter of all its applicants. The difference is largely due to the fact
that Kellogg receives far more applications every year than Booth: 5,545 applications for the
Class of 2011 versus 3,843 received by Booth. Its worth noting that the average GMAT score
for Kelloggs entire applicant pool is an extraordinarily high 700. For admits to the Class of 2011
at Kellogg, its 706eight points below Chicago which tends to get far more quants than Kellogg.
The GMAT ranges for each school is based on the 80th percentile which is how both schools
report the data.
Admission Stats Kellogg Booth
Average GMAT 706 714
GMAT Range 650-760660-760
Average GPA 3.59 3.53
Selectivity 19.5% 24.8%
Yield NA NA
.
Enrollment:
Both Kellogg and Booth are major MBA schools with very large enrollments. Of the top
business schools, only Harvard, Wharton and Columbia have total full-time enrollments that
exceed Northwestern and Chicago. Once you add the sizable part-time MBA programs that both
Kellogg and Booth offer, these two institutions are even larger than Harvard, Wharton and
Columbia. In fact, theres only one major school with a larger enrollment: New York
Universitys Stern School due to its massive part-time enrollment. Both Kellogg and Booth
enroll roughly the same number of full-time MBAs: Kelloggs 1,241 is just slightly larger than
Booths 1,185. The numbers below are for the Class of 2011.
Enrollment Stats KelloggBooth
Total MBA Enrollment1,241 1,185
Women 33% 35%
International 33% 35%
Minority 22% 25%
.
Poets & Quants:
The most surprising stat here is the small percentage of students at Kellogg who have
undergraduate degrees in the humanities. At 18%, its almost the smallest of all the major
business schools. Thats a bit shocking due to the reputation that Kellogg MBAs have for having
high interpersonnel skills. Obviously, the fact that Kellogg interviews all its applicants pays off.
The Booth number of humanities grads is likely an overestimate due to the fact that Booth
reports its number as liberal arts and others. Both schools admit a very high percentage of
applicants with business or economics undergraduate degrees. At Booth, nearly half of the Class
of 2011 has one of those two degrees. At Kellogg, its 46%.
Undergrad DegreesKelloggBooth
Humanities 18% 33%
Engineering/Math 35% 18%
Business/Economics 46% 48%
.
Jobs and Pay:
The severe recession of 2009 hit Northwestern and Chicago hard as it did all the best business
schools. Surprisingly given the greater diversity of industries that tend to hire Kellogg grads,
however, Chicago seemed to fare slightly better. MBAs employed at commencement at Booth
were a full five percentage points higher than those at Kellogg. Whats most surprising about that
difference is that Booth has historically placed a far higher percentage of its grads in the
especially hard-hit finance field. Even so, Kellogg MBAs tended to get higher starting salaries
and bonusesmore than $5,000 each on averageand they tend to be better paid throughout their
careers. The estimates of median pay over both 20 years and a full career come from a study by
PayScale done for BusinessWeek and do not include stock options or equity stakes by
entrepreneurs.
Job & Pay Data Kellogg Booth
Starting salary & bonus $127,834 $122,131
MBAs employed at commencement 68.1% 73.2%
MBAs employed 3 months after commencement 79.5% 81.7%
Estimated median pay & bonus in 20th year $190,000 $184,000
Estimated median pay & bonus over a full career$3,085,680$2,970,437
.
Who Hires Who:
Big prestigious companies come to both Booth and Kellogg to hire graduates. But as the table
below reveals, Booth MBAs get far more jobs in finance than those from Kellogg. Kellogg, on
the other hand, does exceptionally well in management consulting and consumer marketing
companies. In the latest year for which this data is available, for the Class of 2009, McKinsey
hired more Kellogg grads than Booth MBAs. So did Boston Consulting Group by a dramatic 23
to 9 difference, along with Deloitte, Monitor Group, Booz & Co., and A.T. Kearney. Consumer
marketing giants such as Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kraft Foods, and Samsung
were big hirers at Kellogg and relative no-shows at Booth. But the finance giants greatly offset
that difference at Booth with Credit Suisse, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank,
taking double-digit numbers of Booth grads. Bottom line: If you want a job in finance, Chicagos
a good place to be. If you want a job in consulting or marketing, Kellogg is a great choice. NA
does not necessarily mean that a company didnt hire any graduates from the school, but rather
that the number of grads it did hire was fewer than four.
Hiring Company Number of Hires
at Booth
Number of Hires
at Kellogg
McKinsey & Co. 23 26
Bain & Co. 16 13
Credit Suisse 15 5
BofA/Merrill Lynch 13 NA
Citigroup 12 NA
Deutsche Bank 12 NA
Barclays 10 4
Johnson & Johnson NA 10
JP Morgan Chase 10 NA
Boston Consulting Group9 23
Deloitte 7 11
General Mills NA 6
Accenture 6 NA
Monitor Group NA 6
Booz & Co. 6 9
A.T. Kearney NA 5
PepsiCo Chicago NA 5
Morgan Stanley 5 NA
Dow Chemical 5 NA
Chevron Corp. NA 4
Kraft Foods Global NA 4
Samsung Group NA 4
Baxter International 4 NA
Exxon Mobil 4 NA
United Air Lines 4 NA
.