The Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive Business School Survey ranked Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management fourth in its 2005 survey of business recruiters, published in last week’s Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive ranking is the only business school ranking that tracks the opinions and experiences of corporate recruiters as its exclusive criteria. The 3,267 MBA recruiters surveyed in this year’s poll rated business schools on 20 key attributes that influence their recruitment including a school’s career services and faculty expertise. They also graded the schools based on student qualities such as leadership potential, experience in the field and ability to communicate with recruiters.

Kellogg finished behind Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, the University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon University. It rose from its seventh-place finish in the WSJ/Harris Interactive ranking last year. The school is consistently ranked first in BusinessWeek magazine.

Recruiters give high marks in the rankings to schools with students who will accept their first job offer, Kellogg Senior Associate Dean Robert Korajczyk said.

But Korajczyk said he doesn’t want Kellogg to score high in that category – he’d like the students to choose from many offers.

“It’s very frustrating for a recruiter to come to campus, make a couple of offers and not get any or few acceptances,” Korajczyk said. “That’s something we don’t want to get a high ranking on. We want our students to get as many job offers as possible.”

Korajczyk said the Kellogg administration is proud of the WSJ/Harris Interactive ranking because the school performed well in the other criteria recruiters used in the survey.

“Three of these criteria are things we want to achieve: high-quality students, a well-functioning career management center and students who treat recruiters with respect.”

Second-year Kellogg MBA candidate Jennifer Kosse said while the various business school rankings were important, they didn’t tell the whole story for her when choosing a business school.

“The rankings can leave out a lot of important factors. More important to me was the actual companies who recruit on campus,” Kosse said.

Javier Fierro, a second-year JD-MBA candidate at Kellogg, said he used the various rankings to help him apply to business schools in the same way many high school seniors use them to apply to undergraduate programs, choosing a few reach schools like Kellogg and a few schools from the second and third tiers of U.S. News and World Report and BusinessWeek’s rankings.

“It’s important to kind of diversify the schools you’re applying to,” Fierro said. “I also looked at schools with top career centers since getting a job is the whole point.”

Reach Amanda Palleschi at [email protected].

Top 10 Business schools

1. Dartmouth College (Tuck)
2. University of Michigan
3. Carnegie Mellon University
4. Northwestern University (Kellogg)
5. Yale University
6. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
7. University of California, Berkeley (Haas)
8. Columbia University
9. University of North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)
10. University of Southern California (Marshall)