At the Darden School, teaching matters. In the faculty lounge, student surveys confer bragging rights – and teaching excellence spurs tenure. The students quickly pick up on this. It’s why they come to Charlottesville in the first place. Here, Darden notched a perfect score. That also makes Darden an outlier: aside from IESE, it is the only public program where faculty rank among the ten-best in Bloomberg Businessweek’s survey. Another striking fact? Just two Top 10 MBA programs – Harvard and INSEAD – rank among the 20-best in this category. Instead, upstarts like BYU Marriott, Washington University, and the College of William & Mary have used faculty quality and engagement as their calling card to separate themselves from larger and better-funded programs.