The Wall Street Journal has released its fourth annual ranking of business schools, which results from a survey of corporate recruiters the paper conducts in conjunction with Harris Interactive. This year's winner is Harv…er, Whar…er, Stan…I mean, Michigan. Michigan?

That's right. Michigan took top honors, followed by Carnegie Mellon, Tuck (Dartmouth), Wharton (U of Penn) and the University of Chicago.

According to CareerJournal.com, the paper's executive career site, the rankings now separate schools into three categories—national, regional and international. Here's more:

The new approach retains most of the elements of the original methodology used in the Journal's three previous M.B.A. rankings, including recruiters' perceptions of the schools and students on 20 key attributes, such as leadership potential, teamwork skills and interpersonal qualities, and the school's "mass appeal," or the number of recruiters that it attracts. A revised and expanded part of the ranking formula is "supportive behavior," defined as the recruiters' intention to return to a particular school and the likelihood of making job offers to its graduates in the next two years.

What has changed most is the calculation used to arrive at each of the rankings. It was revised to give equal weight to perception, mass appeal and supportive behavior because the old formula resulted in a ranking that was increasingly driven by the mass-appeal factor. In essence, the ranking was becoming more a reflection of the size of the school and its recruiter pool than of recruiters' feelings about the school and its students.Regardless of methodology, it's interesting to note how far Harvard has dropped. In this poll, HBS ranks 14th. And that's supposed to reflect how recruiters think about Harvard's B-school? I wonder how many students looking at top business schools rank Harvard 14th on their list.

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