myself

IMHO, Wharton has the best overall placement and much nicer environment to work in (assuming your goal is academic market).

not true. there are hundreds of papers in OM. supply chains contracting is a huge topic. there are entire surveys citing hundreds of papers using game theory e.g. Game Theory in Supply Chain Analysis - Springer

OM is very fragmented and it is rare that you find a department specializing in something, there is always mix. Main OM areas would be supply chains, revenue management, manufacturing, healthcare, service operations, behavioral operations, OM-finance interface, new product development. Business schools tend to do more econ-oriented OM and empirical OM than engineering schools, and while top engineering grads will get top business school placement, 90% of them go to industry. Business schools place many more graduates to academia. See here for top journals: The UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankingsâ„¢ - Naveen Jindal School of Management - The University of Texas at Dallas

i dont think there is real difference: like in other fields number of OM graduates is lower than number of positions, so demand is high. the problem is probably naming: some OM groups are part of Technology areas, some are decision sciences, some are management etc.

PhD programs want graduates to be successful both in short term (good jobs) and long term (tenure etc.). There is much more value to the program from a "famous" graduate than from a "failing" one. Your PhD costs the school about $250,000 in scholarships and training, thus there is always a pressure to show return on this investment. Placement and long-term success of graduates is this return. Students who are uncomfortable communicating with other students are a distraction: PhD programs are small and if 33% or 25% of your student population does not "gel" with others, it is a problem. Admission committee are the same people who will later deal with this problem.

There are always exceptions: most older applicants do not have publications etc. But even for someone with this profile, PhD admissions committee will be worried that the person will not be comfortable in the classroom with "kids" and s/he will not have the patience to fight for tenure at the age of 50.

Best way to find out is to contact alumni.

This is a nice dream to have: working with INSEAD or others. Do you have a single example of this happening? IMHO, Rochester is far superior - it used to be top PhD program with placements to Stanford, MIT, Wharton and Duke, It is no longer top but still pretty decent. Nanyang is virtually unknown outside Singapore.

Finance Worldwide Directory of Finance Faculty and Professionals

Duke's placement record in operation is very bad (although the school itself is great and faculties are great too). But there is something they are not doing right. USC is also not known for placing people well in operations. UCLA has far better record.

Rochester is one of these low ranked MBA programs which is extremely good in PHD placement/teaching. In some areas like finance and accounting they consistently place people to top schools. In other areas they do it from time to time. Which area are you in? Although I would think that Rochester beats ASU in any area when it comes to PhD placement...

Exactly my point: this is why past placement matters so much! Yes, it does! Where do people go if they are not tenured at Stanford? Another top 10-20 school. But if you don't get tenure at a top-20 school then you fall much-much further down. And a good PhD program does exactly this: it teaches you to be productive. That is the big difference. This is why top PhD program places people well. Not because Stanford habitually hires from MIT etc. but because MIT is good at producing productive people.

The only relevant ranking criterion is past placement which is a strong predictor of future placement. All you need to do is to look at top 10-20 schools and see where faculties in your area of interest are coming from (or look at entire placement history which is often not available easily). You will see that school which are seemingly productive, have good brand recognition etc. often have very poor placement. So many any other rankings (e.g., paper or citation counts) are often misleading.

Keep in mind that MIS programs severely limit you in the choice of schools: only 5-6 top institutions have MIS PhD programs, so the job market is rather thin. Most schools rely on visitors and adjuncts to teach MIS courses.

your math background is unlikely to impress strategy/management people, this is not what they are looking for. You will be much better off applying for something that requires lots of math, like operations or decisions sciences. This is where physics recs and training will count.

Interesting choice of journals. Management Science, Operations Research and M&SOM are typical top journals but POMS and JOM are second-tier, IMHO. The corresponding rankings are quite different. Good luck!

The key question: is the school that made an offer a member of this April 15 council? If not, they can do whatever they want (non-US schools do this often)... And in this case if you accept the offer and then renege on it, you do burn all the bridges... Not just with that one school.

I can't find any real placement stats: there is this PhD Program - Stephen M. Ross School of Business but this is a "sample". So they don't tell you about people who went to industry or did not get any jobs. Do you see a better list somewhere?

Which area? The question is meaningless without specifying the department.

Define "competitive". An absolutely top candidate in OB will stand no chance in Operations and vice versa. It is apples to oranges.

Much bigger question is, IMHO, which program has a history of placing graduates well. I know of top-10 programs in my field which have several super-star professors but which nevertheless failed to produce above-average graduates. If the PhD education system is not setup the way it should be in the department, no number of big names will help...

1. Subscribe to various SSRN updates to stay tuned to most recent papers. 2. Subscribe to Table of Contents Notification services at EBSCO or similar to your journals of interest. 3. Subscribe to key words of your interest at EBSCO or similar.

This has less to do with individual schools and more with areas of research. More quantitative areas rightfully focus on younger applicants (finance, operations, quantitative marketing etc.). In other areas it is actually preferred to have applicants with significant work experience (e.g., if you study accounting you might have an edge with CPA and 10 years of experience, organizational behavior is another one etc.).

Sorry, will disagree on multiple point. First, most of these numerous schools (even accredited) place no weight on quality of publications, or do not require publications at all. In reality, if you look at the set of people who even try to publish in high-quality journals, it is quite small. In large part because most academics (say in marketing) will not even understand top-level publication (e.g., in Marketing Science) let alone try to publish there. For top-school graduates, median number of publications is 1 (dissertation, done with advisor), their best work. So one cannot count the number of people producing some kind of work, just like one cannot count the number of aspiring entrepreneurs and conclude that VCs are too strict, or the number of aspiring actors in Hollywood and conclude that the number of movies they produce is too small. Second, I am hard-pressed to find an examples of the statement "majority of great scholarship occurs outside of those few journals". True - a lot of great scholarship occurs in companies (Bell Labs, TJ Watson lab, Google, Microsoft) but NOT in low-ranked journals. These companies are as selective with hiring as top journals with accepting papers. I am happy to be proved wrong. Third, having reviewed papers from many journals of different quality, I must say that even top journals publish a lot of rubbish, and once you go down the list, quality drops off sharply. To me, it sometimes seems that even top journals' requirements are too weak. The media number of citations in top journals is 0. How good of a quality can these papers have??

That is a pretty weak rating of journals, compiled by British professors. I would say only half of their top-ranked journals would be ranked as "A" by leading US schools...