John A. Byrne, who first developed a ranking system for business schools while he was at Business Week, now has a major (and very interesting) website that also provides rankings; this year he has adopted something resembling Nate Silver’s statistical tweaking of multiple polls in order to form a more comprehensive view of MBA programs.

Bryne incorporates rankings from Bloomberg Business Week, Forbes, U.S. News, The Financial Times, and The Economist to obtain his results.  One great thing about the Poets & Quants Best MBA Programs is that you can see the different rankings side by side along with Bryne’s results.

A special nod is due the University of Washington and the University of Minnesota: “Among the top 50 business schools, the big winners were Washington University’s Olin School in St. Louis, up 11 places to finish 29th from 41st last year, the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School and the University of Washington’s Foster School, both up seven places to rank 27th and 33rd, respectively.”

We also want to remind readers of something noted in our own rankings: some schools with a strong engineering focus–Texas A&M, Purdue, and Georgia Tech–also have outstanding business schools.

No big surprises among the leading programs nationwide, all of which are in private universities: Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Penn, Northwestern, MIT, Columbia, and Dartmouth.

Below are the public university MBA programs ranked among the top 50, according to Poets & Quants:

9–UC Berkeley

12–Virginia

13–Michigan

17–UCLA

18–UT Austin

19–North Carolina

21–Indiana

26–Wisconsin

27–Minnesota

28–Ohio State

31–Maryland

32–Texas A&M

33–Washington

34–Penn State

39–Purdue

40–Georgia Tech

41–Michigan State

42–Iowa

43–Illinois

46–Arizona State

48–UC Irvine

49–Georgia