SMU’s Cox School of Business was named the nation’s twentieth best business school in rankings released by BusinessWeek magazine on Friday.

The list was the first by the publication, who said on their website that the list was based on measures of “student engagement, post-graduation outcomes, and academic quality.”

The rankings were produced by BusinessWeek and Cambria Consulting, based out of Boston.

They identified 84 colleges that met “stringent quality criteria” and then surveyed 100,000 business majors. They asked the undergraduates to rate their programs including all facets of their education, which included curriculum, faculty, facilities and grading policies.

Post-graduate data was collected by surveying 2,000 recruiters and an analysis of starting salaries. BusinessWeek also used its own data to determine which schools send the most students to the nation’s top MBA programs.

The studies’ data on SMU gave the school a 69.78 — ranking it No. 20 overall in the survey. Cox received a high ranking from students, high academic quality and a high MBA feeder school rank. The school was ranked low by recruiters polled.

Both the teaching and facilities received A pluses and job placement was given an A. Cox’s average SAT score is a 1339.

SMU was the highest ranked private Texas business school.

The magazine said that business majors have fared better than any other discipline, with starting salaries up more than 49 percent since 1996, compared with 39 percent for engineering students and 29 percent for liberal arts graduates.

The complete rankings of the Top 50 Undergraduate Business Schools are available in BusinessWeek and hits newsstands today. The rankings are also available on BusinessWeek online at http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/undergraduate/index.html.