By Geoff Maslen*

Many graduates and business people hoping to accelerate up the career ladder would like to undertake an MBA. The choice is wide: all over the world, business schools have been rapidly expanding the provision of MBAs to meet the demand from existing and new global markets, most notably China, India and Russia.

In 1991, only nine MBA programs were available in China; yet 15 years later, according to BusinessWeek magazine, the number had exploded to more than 100. In India, more than 1000 business schools now offer the MBA degree, including 300 new schools created in the last 10 years.

In Russia, at least 100 business schools now enrol students and most have been launched since the 1990s. Few of the schools, however, produce their own PhDs so they mainly draw on graduates of US business schools which provide them with research-trained business PhDs.

In an article specially prepared for MBAProgramme, Associate Professor Jenny George offers tips on how to choose a good business school. As Professor George notes, business schools compete to score highly in the global rankings which are now a feature of higher education.

But as she says, while prospective MBA students should not be too concerned about rankings, they should care about the underlying factors they measure.

As with all types of university rankings, which business school wins a place in the world’s top 100, or even the top 1000, depends on whether the school’s overall performance is being assessed or whether the focus is on one main subject area such as the MBA, Executive MBA and so on.

Then again, how schools rate also depend on the criteria used by whoever is doing the assessing and how much weight is ascribed to each factor. Business schools that run MBA programs are probably more analysed and ranked by media and other organizations than any other academic degree.

While Britain’s Financial Times newspaper has its highly-regarded classification system, the Economist Intelligence Unit uses a different method, as does the US BusinessWeek, U.S.News and World Report, The Wall Street Journal and many other magazines and newspapers.

Regional magazines such as AsiaWeek and national newspapers such as the Australian Financial Review publish rankings of business schools and their courses on a more localised scale but with often widely different criteria.

One of the established rankings taken seriously by business schools, certainly in English-speaking countries, is that published by the Financial Times which each year ranks the top 100 MBA programs, as you can see here.

The Financial Times uses a complicated array of criteria involving 20 different items in which each is scored from 20 points down to 1 point. These range from the salary levels of graduates three years after graduating to the proportion of faculty with doctorates.

In contrast to the Financial Times system, the Economist Intelligence Unit has 18 measures it uses in drawing up its list of the top 100 MBA business schools. These range from new career opportunities and personal development to education experience and salaries before and after the MBA degree. You can see the top 100 MBA programs listed here:

In each of the main global rankings of business schools in general and MBA courses in particular, the United States tends to dominate. In the MBA rankings devised by the Financial Times, 57 US schools make it into the top 100 compared with just under 50 in the list drawn up by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

In the FT rankings, only 16 British schools are listed and a dozen European business schools. Canada has six of its business schools in the top 100 while China, despite its enormous population, has three. You can see tables listing the top US, top British and top European schools.

But as China is devoting increasing resources to boosting the academic standing of its top universities and it will not be long before those in the Middle Kingdom begin challenging Western universities.

How rankings compare

The two sets of rankings compiled by the Financial Times and the Economist Intelligence Unit have markedly different outcomes at the top end of the scale. For example, whereas the FT places the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in first spot, the EIU has it at number 17; similarly the FT has the London Business School in second place whereas the EIU puts it in ninth position and while the FT gives third place to the Columbia Business School, the EIU has it way down at number 21.

Both systems, however, rank Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in fourth place yet whereas the FT assessors give MIT’s Sloan school seventh spot on the ladder, the EIU pushes it down to 18. On the other hand, Cambridge University’s Judge school scores a 7 with the EIU and a fairly close 10 with the FT.

Then again, Switzerland’s IMD is ranked first out of the 100 MBA schools ranked by the EIU while the FT has it placed at number 14. The EIU ranks Spain’s IESE Business School second out of the 100 but the FT has it at number 11.

Although large differences in the scores do appear between some of the schools, there is remarkable agreement overall in the two sets of rankings, with a majority of the schools ranked highly appearing in the same grouping. So 12 of the top 20 schools appear in the FT and EIU listings while the two rankings include almost all the same schools in their top 100. You can see how the two tables compare here.

* Geoff Maslen is the author of six books on education, and the arts. He has been reporting on education issues for Australian and overseas newspapers and magazines since 1980. With Karen MacGregor, he is one of the founding editors of University World News – the global online higher education newspaper.

Financial Times Top 100 MBA business schools 1 Pennsylvania University Wharton 2 London Business School 3 Columbia Business School 4 Stanford University GSB 5 Harvard Business School 6 INSEAD 7 MIT: Sloan 8 IE Business School 9 Chicago University GSB 10 Cambridge University Judge 11Ceibs 11 Iese Business School 13 New York University Stern 14 IMD 15 Dartmouth College Tuck 16 Yale School of Management 17 Hong King UST 18 HEC Paris 19 Oxford University Said 20 Indian School of Business 21Eade Business School 22 Lancaster Business School 22 Manchester Business School 24 Northwestern University Kellogg 25 UCLA Anderson 26 Emory University Goizueta 27 Michigan University Ross 28 Duke University Fuqua 29 Warwick Business School 30 Cranfield Business School 30 Strathclyde Business school 32 UC Berkeley Haas 33 Virginia University Darden 34 Rotterdam Erasmus 35 Imperial College Business School 36 Cornell University Johnson 37 Maryland University Smith 38 Georgetown University McDonough 39 Australian Graduate School of Management 40 Toronto University Rotman 41 City University Cass 41 North Carolina University Kenan-Flagler 41 Shanghai Jiao Tong 44 Edinburgh University Business School 44 Washington University Business School 46 Nanyang Business School 47 Rochester University Simon 48 Carnegie Mellon Tepper 48 Leeds University Business School 48 Michigan State University Broad 48 SDA Bocconi 48 York University Schulich 53 Bradford School of Management TiasNimbas Tilburg University 53 University of Western Ontario Ivey 55 Iowa University Tippie 55 South Carolina University Moore 57 Arizona University Eller 58 Pennsylvania State University Smeal 58 UC Davis 60 USC Marshall 61 Indiana University Kelley 61 Texas A & M University Mays 61 Thunderbird School of Global Management 64 Purdue University Krannert 64 Rice University Jones 64 University of Florida 64 Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 68 UC at Irvine Merage 69 Bath University School of Management 69 Washington University Olin 71 Boston College Carroll 71 College of William and Mary Mason 71 George Washington University 71 Cape Town Graduate School of Business 75 Melbourne Business School 76 Nottingham University Business School 76 Texas at Austin McCombs 76 Vanderbilt University Owen 79 Notre Dame Mendoza 80 Tulane University Freeman 80 Georgia University Terry 82 Brigham Young University Marriott 82 Nyenrode Business Universiteit 84 Babson College Olin 84 Boston University School of Management 84 Minnesota University Carlson 87 Ohio State University Fisher 88 Arizona State University Carey 88 Temple University Fox 88 Alberta University 88 Wisconsin-Madison University 92 British Columbia University Sauder 93 Ipade 93 Pittsburg University Katz 95 Eada 96 McGill University Desautels 97 Vierick Leuven Gent Management School 98 University College Dublin Smurfit 99 EM Lyon 100 Case Western Reserve University Weatherhead

The Economist Intelligence Unit Top 100 MBA schools 1 IMD - International Institute for Management Development 2 IESE Business School 3 Chicago GSB 4 Stanford GSB 5 Dartmouth College–Tuck 6 California at Berkeley, Haas 7 Cambridge University Judge 8New York Stern 9 London Business School 10 IE Business School 11 Hong Kong UST 12 Harvard Business School 13Cranfield 14 Vlerick Leuven Gent 15 York Schulich 16 Northwestern Kellogg 17 Pennsylvania Wharton 18 MIT Sloan 19 INSEAD 20 Reading Henley 21 Columbia Business School 22 Michigan Stephen M Ross 23Warwick Business School 24 Ashridge 25 Virginia University Darden 26 Melbourne Business School 27 Oxford, University Said 28 Cornell University Johnson 29 Duke University Fuqua 30 Yale School of Management 31 Hult International Business School 32 HEC School of Management Paris 33 ESADE Business School 34 Notre Dame Mendoza 35 Carnegie Mellon University Tepper 36 Washington Foster 37 International University of Monaco 38 Southern California Marshall 39 Emory University Goizueta 40 University College Dublin Smurfit 41 UCLA Anderson 42 Indiana University Kelley 43 Ohio State University Fisher 44 Rice University Jesse H Jones 45 Imperial College Business School 46 City University Cass 47 Monash University GSB 48 Texas at Austin McCombs 49 North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler 50 Rotterdam Erasmus 51 Mannheim Business School 52 Lancaster University Management School 53 Maryland, University Robert H Smith 54 Wisconsin School of Business 55 Edinburgh University Business School 56 WashingtonU St Louis Olin 57 Macquarie Graduate School of Management 58 Hong Kong University Business and Economics 59 Brandeis International Business School 60 Manchester Business School 61Aston Business School 62Pennsylvania State Smeal 63Bath University School of Management 64Minnesota University Carlson 65Durham Business School 66 Vanderbilt University Owen 67 Birmingham Business School 68 California at Davis GSM 69 Audencia Nantes 70 Strathclyde Business School 71Boston University 72 Pittsburgh Joseph M Katz 73 Chinese University of Hong Kong 74 EM Lyon 75 Purdue University - Krannert 76 Iowa, University Henry B Tippie 77 Leeds Business School 78 Glasgow Business School 79 Newcastle Business School 80 SDA Bocconi 81 Nanyang 82 International University of Japan GSM 83 South Carolina Moore 84 British Columbia Sauder 85 Wake Forest University Babcock 86 Southern Methodist Cox 87 Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Business 88 Rochester William E Simon 89 National University of Singapore Business School 90 TiasNimbas Business School 91 Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad 92 Georgia, University Terry College of Business 93 Nottingham University Business School 94 Curtin University Graduate School of Business 95 Temple University Fox 96 Thunderbird School of Global Management 97 Nyenrode Universiteit The Netherlands Business School 98 Sheffield University Management School 99 Bradford School of Management 100 McGill University—Desautels

Top 20 US MBA business schools

(Ranking number in top 100 shown on left)

1 University of Pennsylvania: Wharton
3 Columbia Business School
4 Stanford University GSB
5 Harvard Business School
7 MIT: Sloan
9 University of Chicago GSB
13 New York University: Stern
15 Dartmouth College: Tuck
16 Yale School of Management
24 Northwestern University: Kellogg
25 UCLA: Anderson
26 Emory University: Goizueta
27 University of Michigan: Ross
28 Duke University: Fuqua
32 UC Berkeley: Haas
33 University of Virginia: Darden
36 Cornell University: Johnson
37 University of Maryland: Smith
38 Georgetown University: McDonough
41 University of Washington Business School

Source: The Financial Times

Top UK MBA business schools

(Ranking number in top 100 shown on left)

2 London Business School
10 University of Cambridge Judge
19 University of Oxford Said
22 Lancaster University Management School
22 Manchester Business School
29 Duke University Fuqua
29 Warwick Business School
30 Cranfield School of Management
30 University of Strathclyde Business School
35 Imperial College Business School
44 City University Cass
44 University of Edinburgh Business School
48 Leeds University Business School
53 Bradford School of Management/TiasNimbas, Tilburg University
69 University of Bath School of Management
76 Notingham University Business

Source: The Financial Times

Top MBA European business schools

(Ranking number in top 100 shown on left)

6 Insead France / Singapore
11 Iese Business School Spain
14 IMD Switzerland
18 HEC Paris France
21 Esade Busines School Spain                                                                                                                          34 Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Netherlands
48 SDA Bocconi Italy
82 Nyenrode Business Universiteit Netherlands
95 Eada Spain
97 Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School Belgium
98 University College Dublin: Smurfit Ireland
99 EM Lyon France

Source: The Financial Times