In a harsh economic climate, a good marketing strategy may heat-up the bottom line.

And administrators marketing MBA programs have found a truly innovative one! Business schools around the country are now touting themselves as the best at graduating students who go on to start-up successful businesses.

So, you want to start a company. Which business school is best?

Steve Kaplan, an entrepreneurship and finance professor at University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says that’s the place to be. As proof, he cites recent student ventures, such as food-delivery service GrubHub, which merged with Seamless earlier this year, and Braintree Payment Solutions LLC, acquired by eBay Inc. for $800 million in September.

Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty say their school is tops for entrepreneurs, pointing to success stories like Palo Alto Delivery Inc. (operating as DoorDash), a food-delivery service co-founded by 2013 M.B.A.s that just landed $2.4 million in funding. And, they note, 18% of last year’s graduating class started their own companies.

Meanwhile, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School touts its own startup incubator and alums like Warby Parker, the trendy eyewear company founded by four 2010 graduates.

These days, business schools want to be known as the ultimate place to hatch a startup. As traditional M.B.A. industries like finance lose steam, schools are catering to candidates with entrepreneurial ambitions, loading up on business plan competitions, accelerators, incubators, classes and research centers devoted to entrepreneurship. But how can students really know which is best?

Rankings abound. Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest ranking of top M.B.A. programs for entrepreneurship placed Stanford at the top spot, while Entrepreneur magazine gives University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business the nod. Poets & Quants, a business-school news website, tallied which schools’ startups attracted at least $1.6 million in funding over the past five years and awarded laurels to Harvard Business School—but that measurement doesn’t account for class size; otherwise Stanford would have more startups per capita.

And schools tout the successful products of their on-campus business incubators. Booth counts at least eight student ventures acquired or merged in the past year; Mr. Kaplan says much of their success resulted from the rigorous coursework, friendly competition and intensive coaching in the school’s New Venture Challenge.

In that program, entrepreneurs and investors pick the 30 most promising business plans from a pool of about 100. Those selected enroll in a credit-bearing course to tweak their plans, practice investor pitches and network; the top plans split more than $200,000 in prize money and in-kind services. Last year a few proposals had similarities to 2006 winner GrubHub, so Mr. Kaplan introduced those teams to the GrubHub leaders.

“Even if you don’t get started, it’s a great learning experience,” Mr. Kaplan says. “We’re in the business of teaching.”