Top 1000 business schools
By Geoff Maslen
Geoff Maslen has been an education editor and education correspondent for newspapers and magazines across the globe for the past 40 years
A recent addition to business school rankings was a list of the world’s top 1000 business schools according to their overall quality and not a focus on just one degree such as the MBA. A French consulting company, SMBG, created a special offshoot called Eduniversal in 2007 aimed at providing students around the world with assistance in selecting the best universities in particular fields.
Unlike other newspaper and magazine rankings that focus on one or other of the courses offered by university business schools, such as the MBA, Executive MBA and so on, Eduniversal set out to identify the best business schools. That is, the company was interested in how each school performed overall, rather than how well it educated students undertaking a particular course. To see the full list of 1000 schools and the countries where they are based, click here
At a big international conference in Paris in November, 2008, Eduniversal presented awards to the world’s top 27 business schools. This followed an extensive investigation that identified the most important 1000 schools from around the globe.
Eduniversal nominated the leading 27 schools – three drawn from each of nine geographic regions – following research that had pointed to the top 1000 and with the assistance of the deans of the schools and a group of experts in the field of business education. Further analysis reduced this number to 100 and from this group the final 27 were chosen.
The full list of the 27 schools and their regions can be seen here. Many of the world’s best-known schools, including the London Business School, the Hong Kong UST Business School and INSEAD, the international graduate business school with campuses in France and in Singapore, scored a place in the final Eduniversal list.
Overall, the selection appeared reasonably consistent with other rankings of business schools by groups such as the Financial Times, BusinessWeek and U.S. News and World Report. You can see lists of the top US schools published by the two latter publications here
But there were some significant differences because of the various methods used by the media groups to assess the schools and the fact that most of the rankings focus on only one aspect of a school, such as its MBA or Executive MBA programs.
The top nine business schools out of the 27 selected by Eduniversal, one from each of the nine different regions, were the University of Auckland Business School (Oceania), Harvard Business School (Northern America), ITESM-EGADE Monterrey (Latin America), Copenhagen Business School (Western Europe), University of Economics in Prague (Eastern Europe), Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (Central Asia), Hong Kong UST School of Business and Management (Far Eastern Asia), Tel Aviv University Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration (Middle East) and University of Cape Town UBT Graduate School of Business (Africa).
Under the Eduniversal system, the 1000 business schools identified as the “most important” were allocated one to five “palms”. In the first league, with five palms, are 100 schools graded as the best universal business schools with major international influence.
As with the overall 1000 schools, the US dominates the selection of the 100 schools with 29 in the list. That compares with seven for Britain and France, six for Canada, five for Australia and four for South Korea. China and Japan managed to get three of their schools into the list. The names of the 100 schools can be seen here.
The 200 schools in league two have four palms and are considered top business schools internationally. See the list here: (TO BE PROVIDED)
League three, with three palms, has 400 schools considered to be excellent business schools nationally with strong continental links. See the list here: (TO BE PROVIDED)
League 4, with two palms, has 200 schools rated as good business schools with regional influence. See the list here. (TO BE PROVIDED)
League five, one palm, has 100 schools in universities with local influence. See that list here:
The company says the list of 1000 schools will be reviewed two years after its first edition, in the last quarter of 2009. After that, the list will be reviewed every four years.
SMBG specialises in reference services and publications for educational and higher educational institutions. It says its Eduniversal initiative is “the first stone of a global federation of education”.
Identifying the “best” business schools
Eduniversal used a range of criteria in selecting its 1000 “best” business schools from around the world. The initial basis focused on five evaluation criteria:
*National educational expenditure per inhabitant;
*GDP of the country where the school was located;
* Population size;
* Number of students in higher education;
* The “local educative landscape”, established according to the number of secondary schools and “the historical dimension of the national educative tradition”;
Other information taken into account during the selection process included:
*Accreditations obtained by the business schools, their level of state recognition, main rankings by media organisations, participation in international academic associations, the opinions of international experts, networks of partners and deans, and principle studies published.
* Advice from an international committee composed of nine experts, each recognised in their own academic communities and internationally.
* Current or past deans of prestigious business schools, directors of international academic associations, and members of deans’ networks.
The company says a further principle used in grading the schools was based on their level of “international influence”. As well, a survey was undertaken to obtain the professional recommendations of the deans of the 1000 business schools along with the opinions of recruiters, and current and former student “communities”.
Between October 2007 and March 2008, the deans in each of the regions were asked which business schools they would recommend to anyone wishing to study business education. Their vote was not mandatory for each country and they could only recommend 50% of the academic institutions selected.
The regional tables show that in the UK, for instance, the top business school with international influence is the London Business School with a recognition rate of 675 of the 1000 deans, followed by the London School of Economics with 547 and the Cranfield School of Management at 464.
In the US, the top school is the Harvard Business School with 731references, followed by MIT (640) and Stanford University (577). The top French business school with international influence is INSEAD with 644 references. By contrast the leading Chinese business schools of Tsinghua University, Peking University and Fudan University were rated by only a third of the deans.
Why nominate the top 1000 schools?
Eduniversal Managing Director Cécile Escape says it is easy nowadays to know all the “best” business schools with the help of regular rankings published by financial newspapers and magazines. But the company argues that this information is often only accessible to a minority of students and, in any case, usually only certain rankings such as MBAs are covered.
Escape says that not all countries in the world are targeted and not all schools are selected by international higher education experts or evaluated by the deans, such as those that participated in the Eduniversal rankings.
“By what means can students immediately identify the business school for them – wherever that may be in the world – when the existing rankings only cover a tiny area when considered on a global level?” Escape asks.
She says that if information sources do exist to answer students’ questions, they are often published in such dense and diverse volumes it is almost impossible for student to form an objective opinion from among such a large choice.
Eduniversal’ s approach, she says, is to give a complete and reliable overview, to provide information about all types of schools, the courses they offer at all levels and in every region on Earth – “no matter what the students’ financials resources are or wherever they want to go”.
“This is the task that the Eduniversal parent company, SMBG, set itself in creating its offshoot – the first online tool for providing orientation advice via a map of the best opportunities and thus giving a head start to students, HR departments and those working within the academic sphere”.
With increasing globalisation, many students want to study abroad while big employers are themselves becoming increasingly international and global recruitment is accelerating and generating a skills deficit, Escape says.
“For business schools, internationalisation is becoming essential in the recruitment of foreign students and teachers, and in the development of exchange programs,” she says. “Business schools have begun to compete with other top universities across the spectrum and they need to improve their visibility to increase their attractiveness and become the unsurpassable global institutions of choice to all companies operating internationally.
The official selection
Using an array of academic selections and publications, Eduniversal applies a “meta-system” to synthesise all the information about the business schools and then, finally, to present its findings to students around the world. The company says this should enable students to choose a business school or university best for them, depending on the region where they live and where they would like to study.
Arguing that the international influence of a school is the main indicator of its value, the company’s researchers used this information to compile a register of 1,000 business schools. In this first selection, the 1000 schools were drawn from the nine principal zones across the planet that cover a total of 151 countries, inhabited by more than 97% of the world’s population:
“The aim of the selection is not necessarily to include the 1,000 best schools but the most important 1000 schools based on a method of quotas,” Eduniversal says on its website. “Being a part of the official selection signifies that every effort is made by the school and country concerned in favour of its national, regional and international influence.”
International influence
“For Eduniversal, the international influence is the capacity of a business school to make a student valuable – and thus to improve their employability both in their own country and internationally,” the company says in a release describing its system of identifying the world’s top business schools.
It says this degree of influence can, in certain cases, be limited to a local dimension in a country where the business school represents the only opportunity available to students. The presence of such schools in the official selection is also a way of encouraging them “to develop their efforts in favour of their international influence”.
“To establish this indicator, Eduniversal has created a global evaluation tool, simultaneously grouping all the indices and publications available covering advice for student orientation with the expert opinions of the members of its international scientific committee.”
The company says the main criteria used to characterise a school were:
*Accreditations obtained by the schools such as AACSB, EQUIS, AMBA, Diplôme d’Etat, and so on.
* The principal rankings in the Financial Times, Shanghai Jiao Tong, BusinessWeek, Asiaweek,
Wall Street Journal, AmericaEconomía, THE, SMBG and so forth.
* Participation in international academic associations, including EFMD, CLADEA, CEEMAN, EMBA, AAPBS, &c.)
* Partnership networks of deans and business schools both international and local.
* Studies and websites recognised in the education and university world.
All this information was then submitted to a committee composed of 12 members: nine academic experts, the chief executive of SMBG, the Eduniversal international coordinator and a representative of the Academic Council of the United Nations system.
By definition, Eduniversal says, the official selection is not a ranking but an indication of the international and local influence of a business school. It says the choices students make must also be based on the opinions of all those who currently have or have had relations with the schools.
*Geoff Maslen is founding editor of University World News – the global online higher education newspaper
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