Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business was ranked the 23rd best undergraduate business program in the country by BusinessWeek Magazine’s 2010 rankings. The MSB saw improvements in nearly every judging criteria: “Teaching Quality” (A+, A in 2009), “Facilities” (B, C in 2009), and “Job Placement” (A+, C in 2009).

The completion of the Rafik. B. Hariri Building certainly had an effect not only on the Facilities subcategory, but on Georgetown students overall impression of the business program. In fact, the most telling statistic about how we’ve improved may be the school’s student survey ranking: 29th in 2010, up from 72nd in 2009. 2009’s MSB graduates were also tied for the 2nd highest median starting salary in the country.

Today, U.S. News and World Report released its 2010 rankings of the World’s Best Colleges and Universities, where it’s ranked Georgetown University 129th among 400 other institutions, tied with the University of Aberdeen in the UK and Ohio State University.

In Art and Humanities, it ranked 75th; in Social Sciences, it ranked 57th; in Life Sciences and Biomedics, it ranked 162nd; and it was not ranked among Engineering and IT or Natural Science universities.

Interestingly, on the international list, Georgetown University is ranked below several schools which it ranks above on U.S. News & World Report’s better-known national Best Colleges list, where Georgetown is 23rd, like New York University and Purdue. The discrepancy must lay in the methodology. The international list doesn’t take retention rates, graduation rates, or admissions selectivity into account (but neither does it weigh financial resources, lucky for us).

Instead, the World list is based on academic peer review (40 percent), employer review (10 percent), student-to-faculty ratios (20 percent), citations per faculty (a measurement of faculty research output—20 percent), and ratio of international faculty (5 percent) and international students (5 percent). Georgetown scored based on responses to the employer survey, with a score of 90 out of 100, but had middling scores in other categories—65 out of 10 on academic peer review, 65 points for its student to faculty ratio, 50 points for citation rate, and 24 out of 100 for international faculty.

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Georgetown University currently has 30 undergraduate alumni serving as Peace Corps volunteers, a number which puts its volunteer levels at eighth in the nation among comparatively sized schools in 2010 (PDF). However, that number is down over 14 percent from last year, and down over 54 percent since 2004, according to a press release that came out on Thursday.

Georgetown has seen its ranking consistently fall from second best in the country in 2004 and 2005 to its current spot, tied with the University of Chicago at eighth best among medium-sized schools. Neighboring D.C. universities also fared well in mid-sized university rankings, with The George Washington University and American University taking first and second places respectively in the category.

Full rankings for 2004-2010 (PDF).

Last week, the Financial Times published its list of the world’s best Global MBA Programs (PDF), where it ranked Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business Full-time MBA Program 38th. Up two spots from the 2009 list (PDF), Georgetown’s program snagged a job placement effectiveness ranking of 32nd, a faculty research ranking of 55th, and the “value for the money” ranking of 83rd.

The school’s weighted alumni salary fell only slightly this year, to $121,402, from $121,786. More strikingly, the number of Georgetown MBA students who found employment within three months of graduation dropped drastically from 98 percent in 2009 to 78 percent in 2010.

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Whether or not it turns out that Georgetown could have prevented Sunday night’s fire in New South, it’ll probably irk at least a few residents to learn that Georgetown just made U.S. News & World Report’s list of “10 Schools With Pricey Dorms.”

The Institute of International Education just released the results of its annual survey on study abroad participation, and the findings show that for the 2007-08 school year Georgetown had the 8th highest percentage of undergraduate students studying abroad.

Out of a graduating class of 1,730 students, 989— or 57.2 percent—had gone abroad last year.  That’s an increase over the 2006-07 percentage of students studying abroad, 52.3 percent.  The 2006-07 seems to have been a bit of an anomaly, though: in 2005-07, the rate was 55 percent, in 2004-05 it was 58.7 percent, and in 2003-04 it was 58.9 percent.

Other D.C. schools also had high rates of study abroad participation.  American University had the 7th highest percentage nationwide, with 59.5 percent of its students studying abroad.  George Washington University came in 18th with 45.9 percent studying abroad.

Overall, 262,416 American students studied abroad during the 2007-08 school year, an increase of 8.5 percent from the previous year.

The survey also looks at the most popular study abroad destinations.  The top five destination countries were the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France and China.  While the majority of students (56.3 percent) went to Europe, there were slight gains in the percentage of students going to Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The regional trends nation-wide are largely in line with what Vox found when it looked at the top study abroad destinations for Georgetown students, except for the Middle East.  While only 1.3 percent of all students who went abroad in 2007-08 chose to go to the Middle East, at Georgetown, 5.5 percent of students who went abroad during the 2008-09 school year studied in the Middle East.

Business Week recently released its biannual rankings of Executive MBA programs, and this year they’ve got Georgetown coming in at number 18.  This year’s ranking marks a six-spot fall from McDonough’s 2007 position, when it placed 12th.

The MSB’s EMBA program scored well in the graduate survey portion, earning the 14th highest marks; but it faltered in the poll of EMBA program directors, coming in 21st.  Overall, the program earned a B grade for its teaching and curriculum and a C for its support services.

The rankings also looked at the percentage of female and minority students.  Of the top 50 EMBA programs, Georgetown’s has the 16th lowest percentage of female students, with just 21 percent.  For minority students, though, Georgetown had the fifth highest percentage with 27 percent.

The National Association of College and University Business Officers recently crunched the numbers to come up with a complete ranking of U.S. college and university endowments for fiscal year 2008.

Granted a lot has changed since then, but with an endowment of $1,059,075,000 at the end of fiscal year 2008, Georgetown was ranked 71st.  That figure represents a very slight decrease from the end of fiscal year 2007 endowment, when the endowment stood at about $1.06 billion.

Harvard had the largest endowment nationwide with a total of $36.5 billion.  Yale, Stanford, Princeton and the University of Texas system rounded out the top five.

As Campus Grotto noted, Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon are the only two schools in U.S. News and World Report’s Top 25 Universities that aren’t in the top 33 in terms of endowment size.

Makin’ bank

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently released its database of executive compensation at colleges and universities for the 2007-08 school year and Georgetown’s own John DeGioia isn’t doing too poorly for himself.

With a total compensation of $642,582 (that’s $607,939 in pay and 34,643 in benefits), DeGioia was the 63rd highest paid private university president in the country in 2007-08, according to the Chronicle’s data.  That salary was a $50,965 upgrade from what he received during the 2006-07 school year.

But DeGioia was outdone in the District by the president of American University, Cornelius Kerwin, who was the fifth highest paid private university president with $1,419,339 in total compensation.  The real record-holder, though, was George Washington University’s former president, Stephen J. Trachtenberg.  With a total compensation of $3.7 million, Trachtenberg was the high paid current or former university president by a margin of $2 million.

Photo by Lexie Herman.

CNN recently released a ranking of the most expensive colleges and universities (based on data from the Chronicle of Higher Education) and Georgetown is a very high achiever: according to their data, we’re the second most expensive school in the country this year.

With a total cost of $52,161 for the 2009-10 school year, the only school that Georgetown is cheaper than is Sarah Lawrence College, which clocked in with a total cost of $55,788.  According to CNN, Georgetown’s total cost increased by 2.9 percent from the 2008-09 school year.

Perhaps the most tragic thing about this ranking is that we can no longer point at GW for being so outrageously expensive—they’re a whole two spots and $386 below us this year.