University of Colorado Boulder Rankings by Salary Score™

CU Boulder while reputable for sciences and engineering falls short for business degree students. This school is largely pretentious, expensive, and inflexible. Their MBA program is trying too hard to be a top 10 level school when it's top 100 at best. The Leeds School of Business behind closed doors is struggling to determine what its curriculum should be to position students well. My class in 2019 had a near 100% fail rate for some exams in a class titled "Data and Decisions"--after a 4 day crash course... Read More on fundamental statistics that was supposed to prepare us for top level business management. Leeds doesn't equip students with resources to land jobs. They market their program as "the Green MBA" pushing jobs in sustainability. This is a complete joke. The only real value is the job boards that one can easily find on their one. The curriculum and the aim in finding a job in sustainability is very much a build-your-own-adventure with little direction provided by the faculty or staff. As for alumni? Don't count on great alumni engagement post graduation unless it involves asking you for donations for their already overpriced tuition. Their staff won't help you find jobs if you find yourself unemployed. In fact, they'll probably disable your colorado.edu email without giving you any forewarning (this happened to me recently). Their customer service is weak--a friend of mine in the program who lost his home in the Marshall Fire requested to have his diploma replaced. Instead of offering basic condolences, they said they would replace the diploma for a standard cost of $50. Most decent businesses would have waived this cost considering the tragedy of the Marshall Fire hit so close to home for CO residents. The Deming Center for entrepreneurship? Also a joke full of staff who gloat about "knowing every business owner in the area" and then proceed to never connect you with anyone. I landed a prestigious internship at Tesla--a place no Leeds student had ever been able land a job and had 8,000 applicants--that required me to take a leave of absence. Instead of being excited for opportunities for me as a student and for the future of their alumni network, they forced me to take a full year leave of absence, took away my scholarships and fellowship, and generally made the entire process for getting readmitted as difficult and expensive as they could make it. There was no room for flexibility. What's more? They were still sending students my way asking me to support referrals and letters of recommendation to help their network at Tesla. At best, CU Boulder's business school is an overpriced money pit that races through coursework and leaves students floundering to figure out their own path to success. They're at least 10 years behind in valuable curriculum that's applicable to real world business ventures. Save yourself a lot of wasted time and energy and avoid this business school.

I'm a parent who attended CU and made the mistake of sending one of my kids to the school (2021). Over the years it's become a very poorly managed, third-rate educational institution. Professors don't teach the courses; they instead use third rate hack $50K a year Teaching Assistants who often times don't even have their PhD's in the topic they're overseeing (teaching wouldn't be the appropriate term) - this is how they save money on your over-inflated tuition dime. Most of the courses are taught by Zoom call... Read More (essentially a poor man's online course), and their administration has no control over the functioning of the University - they're a completely unorganized train wreck. The Teaching Assistants don't have to have a spine and speak to the tuition paying students, after all, a Zoom call that is poorly executed or was recorded 4 years ago should be sufficient. They hide behind these ridiculous processes like pathetic cowards, not educators. They don't have any accountability to the students and rarely if ever respond when a student requests help - these types of processes remove all accountability from the make-believe educators and pave the way for the worst teaching skill sets available. Most of them don't even report to the University, they work from home full-time so they're not even at the University to teach an in-person course. So why would a parent pay $18K+ a semester to have their kid take poorly developed online classes from their dorm room? It's a fool's investment. I have two other kids who recently graduated from CSU and UNC, both schools provided a far superior educational experience, as well as the more traditional overall experience most of us parents remember during our college days. I had no choice but to transfer my kid to CSU where she is thriving and will be graduating in 2025. CU sells the school on what we as parents remember from our experiences 30+ years ago, but those days are in the history books. That school, and those experiences do not exist any longer; it's an embarrassment. The school has even contracted with an online sports book (PointsBet). They receive over $1M upfront plus $30 for each new referral...i.e., students. They are selling out the entire student body for profit, as if the highly over-inflated tuition and the tax exemptions which come from being an "educational institution" aren't enough. I'm sure every parent wants their student to learn how to gamble while attending college; pathetic. Send your kids to get a real education at one of the many other Universities in the State if in-state tuition is important, don't waste your time with CU. It's upsetting to see what has happened to a school where I had many good memories, but like so many things in our world today...buyer beware. The school has reduced itself to nothing more than lipstick on a pig.