ASU lands in top 25 of MBA entrepreneurship program rankings

Inc. magazine has ranked ASU’s W. P. Carey School of Business No. 22 in its second annual rankings of MBA entrepreneurship programs worldwide.

The rankings, which include 50 programs, were launched last year with 27 programs by Inc. in partnership with business education publication Poets and Quants. The rankings measured each MBA program on 10 categories, including the percentage of elective courses focused on entrepreneurship, the number of students who launched businesses following graduation and the number of students in each school’s entrepreneurship club.

ASU ranked ahead of the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management, Columbia Business School and Rutgers Business School. Read the full rankings.

The rankings of MBA entrepreneurship programs follows on the heels of ASU ranking No. 1 in innovation for the sixth year by U.S. News and World Report.

Entrepreneurship plays a major role at the W. P. Carey School in many ways: a popular undergraduate major in business entrepreneurship, student funding competitions programmed through the school’s Center for Entrepreneurship and deep ties to entrepreneurial opportunities with other ASU schools through the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute. 

Earlier this year, ASU launched a first-of-its-kind master’s degree program offered by the highly ranked Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts, W. P. Carey School of Business and Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. The Master of Science in Innovation and Venture Development (MS-IVD) is a one-year program offered on ASU’s Tempe campus that prepares leaders with the mindset, skill sets and practice needed to launch successful ventures in any industry or sector, inside existing organizations or as new entities. Students are required to launch a new product or service that solves a problem as a graduation requirement.

In addition to the new ranking, Poets and Quants recently highlighted the business of a W. P. graduate as a 2020 Most Disruptive MBA Startup. The publication noted that “MBA students at W. P. Carey founded the first academic chapter of Conscious Capitalism,” which exposed students to entrepreneurial ideas centered around selfless service.

“Our goal is to develop the next generation of disruptive leaders of innovation,” said W. P. Carey Dean Amy Hillman. “This No. 22 ranking certainly validates our strategy and recognizes amazing students who have leveraged our programs to become accomplished entrepreneurs.”