#1 Full-Time MBA · Stanford, California
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#31 The Top 100 MBA Programs
Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame · Notre Dame, Indiana · Private
“The alumni network is the curriculum.”
Reviewed by David Krug · July 2026
Data anchored to the 2026 U.S. News table, Poets&Quants reporting, and school-published class profiles
82
Very goodBP Score
$130,000Tuition, total
680Avg. GMAT
38%Acceptance rate
87%Placed at 3 months
$140,000Median base salary
Our review
Mendoza’s pitch used to sound soft, “Grow the Good in Business,” until corporate America started hiring for exactly that. The ethics and values curriculum, decades old, now maps onto compliance, ESG, and stakeholder-governance roles that barely existed when it was written.
The harder asset is the subway-alumni effect: Notre Dame’s graduate loyalty shows up in reply rates, referrals, and a placement print in the high 80s from a campus two hours outside Chicago. The class is small, Catholic-inflected without being doctrinaire, and heavily Midwestern in its eventual placement map.
What impressed us
- Network loyalty. Notre Dame alumni answer, refer, and hire their own.
- Values-forward curriculum. Ethics programming that predates the ESG wave.
What gave us pause
- Location friction. South Bend recruiting means Chicago trips.
- Modest class scale. 120 students caps on-campus employer variety.
The verdict
Buy the network and the values positioning — both are real and both compound. Candidates chasing coastal tech or banking scale should size the geography honestly.
82
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97.1
The Wharton School
#2 Full-Time MBA · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Read the review →#3 Full-Time MBA · Boston, Massachusetts
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