Harvard Business School is the best business school in the country, right?

How about asking the people who actually hire new MBAs. According to the results of a survey of Fortune 500 companies which hire first-year MBAs, the B-school comes in third, behind Northwestern's Kellog School and Pennsylvania's Wharton school.

"We were looking at the end product, the perception of those who hire," said Richard Brecker, chairman of Brecker & Merryman, the management consulting company that conducted the survey of 21 arbitrarily selected "top" business schools. For the survey, the firm asked personnel directors to rate schools' graduates in more than 40 different areas.

Peter Llewellyn, the B-School's placement director, questioned the accuracy of the results. Llewellyn said rating categories like "best value" work against Harvard MBA's, who typically earn the highest starting salaries of any B-School grads.

Llewellyn said he also thinks Harvard suffered against more specialized competition in certain areas, like accounting, where Harvard didn't place in the top 5, and didn't take into account the magnitude of the differences among schools.

Nevertheless, Llewellyn did boast that "the categories where Harvard came out number one [like overall marketing skills, oral and writing skills] were the most important."

Brecker, calling Harvard "a very fine business school," downplayed the significance of Harvard's bronze-medal finish. He said the real surprises were Stanford's ninth place finish, and Indiana's seventh place finish.

And was the survey objective? Yes, said Brecker, noting that his alma mater--Yale--came in 21st of 21.