The Princeton Review ranked the Darden School and its Batten Institute's graduate entrepreneurship program the third best in its eighth annual survey of 2,000 schools last week.
Robert Franeck, senior vice president and publisher of the Princeton Review, said the publication looked at entrepreneurship in three different ways when determining this decision.
The first was examining the curriculum of the program and actual classes provided, and the second was by evaluating faculty members and seeing whether they were successful entrepreneurs as they maintained businesses outside of their university life.
Lastly, the Review looked at what entrepreneurial ventures students created and whether they were still successful post-graduation.
"All of the schools are superlative and they, Darden included, have been very clear and focused about making entrepreneurship part of the vernacular at the University," Franeck said.
Philippe Sommer, director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at Darden, said he thinks Batten earned this ranking because of its teaching method, which is more hands-on than theoretical.
"We are very proactive," he said. To him, Batten is about "trying things, failing, starting over and trying again."
The Review examines what programs the schools offer when it presents its annual rankings, he added.
"Anybody can be an entrepreneur," Sommer said. "To us, entrepreneurship is not about being in business school per se. It is a mindset, and it is applicable to almost anything anybody does"
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