Here's How We Calculated The World's Best Business Schools

Our fourth annual survey of the World's Best Business Schools is out.

And while our list may look a bit different than last year's list, that's because we went about conducting our survey a bit differently.

This year, we enlisted the help of SurveyMonkey, a data-collecting surveying tool, to target a specific audience: managers, HR recruiters, and business owners in all fields who have experience hiring candidates with MBAs. We only targeted American professionals, who are based all over the U.S.

Responses came from more than 300 professionals, who work in a variety of industries, including health care (17%), government (8%), technology (7%), finance (5%), and more. Here's the breakdown of industries:

SurveyMonkey

We then asked these professionals to select what they believe are the top 10 most prestigious business schools in the world. This generated a percentage of responses for each school, which enabled us to rank the schools.

Over 77% of respondents selected Harvard University as a top tier business school, pushing the school to number one on our list. Yale came in at #2 with over 60% of respondents choosing the school, and Stanford (last year's winner) came in at #3 with over 58% of responses.

We also asked respondents to determine the value of an MBA. Surprisingly, a majority 31% of respondents said that an MBA is only "slightly important" and 30% of respondents said that an MBA is "moderately important." Only 3% of respondents said that an MBA is "extremely important." Here's what they said:

SurveyMonkey

And while many people often tout the biggest benefit of business school as the large network of contacts, our respondents overwhelmingly said that "skills and knowledge" is the most valuable asset an MBA provides:

Now read the full list of the World's Best Business Schools.