TOP PRIVATE SCHOOLS

The best of the best was Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management, a private school where business grads earned more than $12 for every annual tuition dollar spent—in no small part thanks to the cut-rate $4,110 annual tuition paid by students who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which make up about 95% of BYU's undergraduate business enrollment. The remaining 5% who are not Mormons pay double the tuition.
Brent Wilson, director of the undergraduate business management programs at BYU, says Marriott students, in part because of their Mormon background, have an extra level of maturity at graduation that recruiters are willing to pay for. He added that BYU's ROI—like that of any school that places a large number of grads in the financial services industry—may take a hit this year, if students have a tough time finding high-paying jobs as a result of the industry's implosion. "The majority of our students would [typically] go someplace in finance or corporate finance or financial services," Wilson says. "I don't know whether that's going to be the case this year."
Cornell University came in a very distant second among the privates, with business grads earning $2.70 for every annual tuition dollar spent. Cornell is an anomaly in that the university is private but the business program is in a state-assisted portion of the school, which brings down the tuition to $20,364, which is somewhat more manageable when compared to annual costs well north of $35,000 for many private programs.