Irish nationally ranked! Indiana has three B-schools in BusinessWeek's top 30.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Opener

The latest B-school rankings from Business-Week are out, and this year there are three Hoosier institutions in the top 30. Only California and New York can claim more top-notch business schools. Not Massachusetts. Not Illinois.

The Kelley and Krannert schools at Indiana and Purdue universities have long claimed places in the B-school spotlight, this year ranking 20th and 26th, respectively. But the new list also includes the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, which debuts in the No. 29 spot, "The Irish fight their way into the top 30, boasting a huge alumni base and a strong curriculum," Business Week declares. "Students rank Mendoza among the strongest in ethics."

"It's by the strength of our intellectual capital and the quality of our student body," believes Mendoza's dean, Carolyn Woo. The college, she says, is well respected for the volume and quality of its research in such areas as finance, consumer marketing, management and accounting. As for the student body, "it's reflected in such things as our applicant pool and selectivity ratio.

Our pool has been growing, as has the quality of the pool in terms of test scores."

Business Week honors are practically old hat down in Bloomington, but the people at the Kelley School of Business gladly accept them nonetheless. "We're always delighted to be included among the best B-schools in the world," says Dan Dalton, the school's dean. "If you dig a little further, there are five areas: finance, marketing, general management, global scope and technology. In the first three we're in the top 10. We have an emphasis here on finance, marketing and strategy, so that's fantastic."

Richard Cosier, dean of the Krannert School of Management at Purdue in West Lafayette, is equally pleased. "The survey is basically broken down into three areas: recruiters, students and academic reputation. We do pretty well in all three areas."

Another place Purdue fares especially well is value. For each school, Business Week calculated the average MBA payback time. Researchers added up the total investment in terms of tuition, fees and lost income, then figured how long it would take to recoup that investment through the increased earnings that school's MBA degree could be expected to deliver.

Business Week reports that Purdue MBA recipients boost their salaries by 80.4 percent to an average of $77,000, giving them enough extra income to pay back the $97,200 total investment in 4.5 years. Only...