Once you decide upon your goals and aspirations in terms of post-MBA industry, post-MBA function, geography you wish to work, you should research the following aspects of a B-school MBA program:
Key Projects/Courses/Competitions
What are 3 to 4 key projects or courses a school has to offer in terms of management learning, industry interaction and application of theories to projects of consequence? For example Michigan University Ross School of Business offers the Ross Leadership Initiative (RLI) Crises Challenge which is a time-sensitive, role-playing competition that tests students' capacity to think on their feet and cope under pressure. Watch this video for more details
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aovuava64M
Another example would be ISB's Experiential learning program wherein teams of students work as consultants for companies on key operations, finance and strategy projects for a span of 4-5 months. More information about that can be found out here:
https://www.isb.edu/pgp/ExperientialLear ... amme.Shtml
Such programs offer huge practical management learning to students and aspirants should look at them.
Employment Reports
1) Industry Split
2) Function Split
3) Recruiters list: See which companies are regular recruiters over the years.
Faculty
Study their research areas and if possible briefly look at summaries of their published papers
Batch Strength
Higher the batch strength, bigger the alumni group, bigger peer and alumni networking opportunities. Works opposite way too a bigger group is using school facilities but that is not a concern if the school has a good reputation in imparting quality business Education to students regardless of batch-size.
Talk to Alumni
Nothing better than getting subjective feedback via call or email. Talk to them about Career enhancing opportunities courses/competitions/projects/fairs which the school throws at you. But make sure to talk to multiple Alumni as individual feed-back may be biased.
Rankings
Rankings are perhaps the last attribute you should look at, but we suggest to use rankings with a pinch of salt. It is always advisable to look at the parameters which are used to calculate the rankings before you start bucketing schools according to rankings.
