Members of the Darla Moore School of Business celebrated the No. 1 rankings its undergraduate and graduate international business rankings nabbed this year.
The undergraduate program has been a perennial feature atop the U.S. News and World Report’s international business rankings, but the graduate program hasn’t been No. 1 since 2004, said Peter Brews, who became dean of the school in January. Last year, it was No. 3.
“What is really good is for us to get back to being No. 1 on both of them, and I think that’s an accomplishment that no one else has done,” Brews said Wednesday at a celebration outside the Close-Hipp Building. “Not only that, but it’s something that I don’t think is going to be matched easily by anyone else.”
The ranking puts the international MBA program above a number of top-ranked business schools, including the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Columbia University and New York University.
Brews attributed the improvement to a redesign of the international MBA program over the past few years, which Andy Spicer, the program’s chair, said included an increased emphasis on internships
and language studies abroad.
“It’s that mixture of global best practice and local context,” Spicer said.
Brews said he has spent his first few months in Columbia talking to faculty and that he hopes to bring the success of USC’s international business programs to the rest of the school.
“We are looking at a few things inside the school which I think over the next five to 10 years may change somewhat the flavor of the school,” Brews said in an interview. “It’s probably no longer sufficient just to be good in one place.”
Brews declined to elaborate on what those changes might entail, saying it was premature to do so.