A BusinessWeek magazine survey has ranked Pitt’s College of Business Administration (CBA) among the top 50 private and public undergraduate business schools in the United States. In this, BusinessWeek’s first ranking of undergraduate schools of business, CBA ranked 21st among public institutions with undergraduate schools of business.

“To succeed in the ranking, which incorporates five measures of student engagement, postgraduation outcomes, and academic quality, schools must be firing on all cylinders,” said BusinessWeek’s Kimberly Quinn.

To rank the country’s best business programs, BusinessWeek teamed up with Boston’s Cambria Consulting and identified 84 colleges and universities that met stringent quality criteria, then surveyed nearly 100,000 business majors, asking them to rate their programs on everything from curriculum and faculty to facilities and grading policies. To find out how students fared after graduation, the team surveyed 2,000 recruiters and studied starting salaries.

“The undergraduate business degree is now clearly on the path to respectability,” Quinn said. “Business majors have fared better than any other discipline, with starting salaries up more than 49 percent [on average] since 1996, compared with 39 percent for engineering students and 29 percent for liberal arts [graduates].”

BusinessWeek’s Top 50 Undergraduate Business Schools list is available in the magazine’s May 8 issue and on the Web here, along with school profiles, a questions-and-answers section, and interactive tools.