Hi coldshoulder,
Interesting question. There's actually a close relationship between how regional a program is, and the ranking: The highest-ranked schools are much more global, meaning that they attract students from all over the world, and they place plenty of graduates internationally too. This varies by school; some schools such as Chicago Booth and Kellogg in the midwest, or UC-Berkeley Haas in California, are both higher-ranked yet are still somewhat regional -- all three of these do get international students and their graduates do end up working all over the world, but not quite to the same extent as schools like Harvard, Wharton, or maybe Columbia. For those first three examples, they have slightly more people staying local in the area after graduating than the latter three schools might.
If you're thinking of a lower-ranked state school ('top 100' as you said) then it's likely to be VERY regional - meaning, that most of the employers that come to school for on-campus recruiting will be local to the school, and the majority of the relationships that the career services office maintains will be with regional companies. The sphere of influence for a school decreases radically, the lower-ranked it is. There's just too many bschool programs competing in the marketplace for a lower-ranked school to have much clout outside its own backyard.
So, a good question to be asking is, what do you want to do with your career? Do you want to relocate straight out of school to another part of the country/world? If so, you'd be better off going to a bschool in that area, or going to a higher-ranked program that can open more doors to you across geographies. Even longer-term, a higher-ranked program can be a benefit since it will likely have more alumni spread out across the world in more places (and, higher-ranked programs are often larger programs too, so there are just more alumni to go around).
Conversely, some of these lower-ranked/regional programs are MUCH cheaper, and sometimes the ROI is much higher if you're planning on staying in the same area post-MBA anyway. To some degree (no pun intended!), you'll get out of the education what you put into it, and the basics of accounting/finance/marketing etc are covered at all the schools (lots would argue that it's not the same experience to go to a higher-ranked vs lower one but that's a different conversation).
Hope this helps - and you should continue with your research since there are lots of factors to consider in choosing a school - but this is a good question to be asking since it really does matter quite a bit.
Good luck with it!
EssaySnark
