Kurt Badenhausen and Lesley Kump from Forbes:  Is a business school degree worth the considerable investment? Our ranking will help you make that determination by comparing the cost of attaining an M.B.A.–foregone income and tuition–to the prospect of a bigger salary. In short, our study shows which schools offer the best return on your investment.

Not surprisingly, schools with strong finance programs dominated the top of our rankings. Best example: Harvard, which remains our top school with a five-year M.B.A. gain of $162,000. With the meltdown among Internet firms, the top California schools-Stanford, UCLA and Berkeley-fell in our rankings. For the top 25 schools the median five-year M.B.A. gain was $85,000 for the class of 1996. Of course the value of an M.B.A. will last well beyond five years.

The table includes the elite schools where the cost was over $95,000 for two years of tuition and two years of foregone salary. Most of these schools are national in scope and compete against each other for students.

To create the ranking we sent out questionnaires to 20,000 graduates who got M.B.A.s in 1996. These graduates were culled from the 104 U.S.-based and international schools that agreed to participate in the study. We asked alumni for salary information from the year before they entered business school, the year they graduated and 2000.

We discounted the earnings improvements back to 1994, using a rate keyed to money market yields. From the earnings gain we subtracted the discounted M.B.A. investment (two years of lost salary at the pre-enrolment rate and two years of tuition) to derive the M.B.A. gain. Tuitions were adjusted to factor in those students paying in-state tuition at public schools. We adjusted salary data to account for cost-of-living expenses and discarded any school with a response rate below 15%.5-YEAR MBA GAIN. (Money in thousand dollars)