Texas A&M Mays Business School

Mays compresses its MBA into roughly 18 months and points it at the Texas industrial economy: energy, construction, manufacturing, and the corporate operations of a state that keeps importing headquarters. The Aggie network does the rest — a culture of hiring one’s own that functions like a placement guarantee inside Texas.

Placement prints in the high 80s at costs Texans will find hard to argue with. The trade-offs are the classics of the category: a college-town setting, a class that skews homogeneous relative to coastal programs, and a brand whose gravity weakens outside the state’s borders.