Every great business is built on friendship, said J.C. Penney, founder of the giant retail chain that bears his name, about the cornerstone of success.

Elon University has put its own stamp on that page from Penney’s playbook, converting the relational attention it applies to MBA candidates at the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business into a No. 1 overall ranking from Bloomberg Businessweek as the nation’s best part-time MBA program. Elon scored top results in student satisfaction, post-MBA outcomes, teaching quality, and curriculum.

“I must say, it was astonishing,” said Bill Burpitt, chairman of the Elon MBA program and associate dean of graduate studies. “We didn’t have any champagne, but we had a lot of Diet Coke and we drank a lot of that.”

What makes the Bloomberg Businessweek rankings different from other surveys is their heavy reliance on student feedback.

The rankings look at subcategories such as cost per credit hour, how many graduates reported an increase in income, the percentage of income increase they received, teaching quality, caliber of classmates, average class size, average GMAT score, completion rate percentage and curriculum.

Elon’s MBA students are not the traditional candidates found at other schools. Most of its MBA students live between Raleigh and Greensboro, want to stay with their present employers, and are not looking to leave the area. That accounts for why Elon’s MBA graduates didn’t experience percentage income gains as high as those at other schools whose graduates are not geographically anchored and are more apt to uproot for a large salary, Burpitt said.

“There’s not just one thing that we do. It’s the whole culture,” Burpitt said. “We punch every button on the dash to make it feel like we give [students] the experience of a full-time program.”

“We know them before they get here. As soon as they go into our data system … I have their picture and we learn them, so the first night they show up we’re calling them by name,” Burpitt said. The prestige of being at the top of a premier business magazine’s rankings brings with it bragging rights. Burpitt said billboards trumpeting the good news will be erected along I-85 near Mebane and Greensboro within a month.

But there could be more vital spin-offs.

“I would hope that would give us some credibility and add to our strengths to explore a full-time MBA program,” Burpitt said.

The university currently is working on a feasibility study proposal for a full-time MBA program “as an addition to” its present part-time structure, he said. The top national ranking over some of the most highly respected universities in the nation — UCLA, Carnegie-Mellon, Rice University, University of Southern California, the universities of Michigan, Washington and Texas, for example — should be “an enabling factor that might make it more possible.”

Burpitt believes student recruitment also should benefit from the king-of-the-hill ranking.

“Six, seven years ago, we were lucky to break 100,” Burpitt said of the number of students enrolled in the MBA program. That has increased to about 150 students in the program the past three or four years.

The increases have tapered off, “he said, almost entirely due to the economy,” which has created decreases in enrollment at 60 percent to 70 percent of MBA programs across the country.

“With this ranking, if we can get the word out and people see it, that will stimulate a greater degree of interest” to attract Elon MBA candidates, he said.

“This MBA thing is just super, super,” Elon Mayor Jerry Tolley said.

“We sure promote it any way we can,” he said of the town’s relationship with the university. “It could be” that the town will find a way to trade off of the university’s No. 1 ranking to market itself.

“We’re trying to do everything we can to improve our downtown area, much like Chapel Hill. We have an ongoing committee that tries to see how the university and town can work together,” Tolley said.

“Our town is more or less a bedroom community” of 9,000 residents whose workers commute to Greensboro and RTP, Tolley said. “People just love living in our town, and a large part of that is because of the university.”

Dan Way is a contributor to Carolina Journal.