The Full-Time MBA program at The University of Texas at Dallas’ School of Management was ranked one of the Top 50 programs in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The ranking, published yesterday in the magazine’s annual “America’s Best Graduate Schools” edition, places the Full-Time MBA program 23rd nationwide among public universities.

“To be able to show we’re among the Top 50 MBA programs is a testament to the hard work of our faculty and students,” said Hasan Pirkul, dean of the School of Management and Caruth Professor of Management. “Our MBA program started in the mid-1990s and has been eligible for this ranking just since 2002. In those six years, the school’s faculty – and especially the students – have worked hard and shown over and over that the learning that goes on here is competitive on a national level.”

UT Dallas’ program is tied at 49th with Babson College in Boston. The top three schools in this year’s rankings are Harvard, Stanford and Northwestern universities. The dean of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, Dipak C. Jain, earned his Ph.D. in marketing at UT Dallas’ School of Management.

“This latest ranking shows we’ve achieved strong upward momentum in just the few years we’ve been participating in the rankings,” Pirkul said.

Only four other full-time MBA programs in Texas were included in this year’s listing. UT Austin was ranked the best of Texas’ full-time programs at 18, followed by Texas A&M (33), Rice (38) and Southern Methodist University (47).

Of the five, UT Dallas’ program is least expensive for in-state students at about $23,000 for tuition and fees for the program’s duration. Texas A&M is next in tuition and fees for in-state students.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, SMU is the only other full-time MBA program ranked in the Top 50, two spots above UT Dallas at 47th place. Tuition and fees for SMU’s program cost about $83,000 for the full program.

One of the qualities used to determine overall rankings is how corporate recruiters view the value of the program. UT Dallas’ score of 3.2 (on a 5-point scale) is the same as that of SMU, Rice and Texas A&M. Only UT-Austin scored higher in recruiter assessment – 3.8 – than the other Texas universities.

The School of Management’s faculty recently was ranked 17th nationwide in terms of research productivity. “Students tell us that having these successful researchers teaching their MBA classes adds immeasurably to the quality of their coursework,” Pirkul said.