Hi Mtvmty,

Consulting is a pretty broad category. You'd want a different school depending on whether you are interested in marketing consulting (look at a good marketing school like Kellog) or finance consulting (look at a good finance school like Wharton.)

There are lots of great business schools clustered around the Bay Area, Chicago, and Pennsylvania. However, these are pretty high cost areas. You'll need to ask yourself how much rankings matter to you. If you want a top 10 school, you'll probably have to live somewhere expensive. If you are happy with a mid-tier school that fits all of your criteria, you can still get a wonderful education.

There are definitely some hidden gems out there that are not top ranked but provide experienced, interactive faculty, clubs and competitions, etc.

For instance, I am in Babson's Fast Track program. It is like an eMBA (average work experience 10 years), with most of the work online but face-to-face classtime every six weeks with Babson faculty. Overall, Babson is considered a mid-tier school, but I chose to go there because they are ranked #1 in entrepreneurship and that is my specific interest. Class is held in Portland, Oregon which has a very reasonable cost of living.

Now, I'm not advocating my specific program for you, since it is not consulting based, and since and eMBA doesn't provide the exposure to clubs and competitions that a full time program does. I provided the example to show that there are programs that can suit your individual needs very well that aren't the standard top 10 schools.

I'd recommend checking out one of the MBA guides published by magazines like US News and World Report. They break down school rankings by area, so you can find out what schools are great in the area of consulting that interest you. They usually also have a section on hidden gems.

Lastly, you need to consider where you would like to work when you graduate to keep the network factor in mind. For the most part, West Coast schools feed to West Coast companies, and the same for the East Coast. If you go to school in say, Iowa, will they be able to get you into the Chicago firm where you want to work when you graduate? Possibly so (in this case, they're not too far apart), but to be sure, check with the career center to see if that company recruits at that school... and if anyone has been hired from there.

Hope that helps,

Tatiana