Harvard Business School has taken the top spot away from Stanford Graduate School of Business in the Financial Times 2020 global MBA ranking.
Although the Financial Times ranking is designed to favor non-U.S. programs, 15 of the top 25 MBA programs are based in the U.S. This result comes despite the decline in applications to U.S. MBA programs – now in its sixth straight year.
The 2020 top 5 schools have not changed since last year, although their rankings have. Following Harvard are: #2 – University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (up 2 spots); #3 – Stanford Graduate School of Business (down 2 spots); #4 – INSEAD (down 1 spot); and #5 CEIBs in Shanghai, China (unchanged).
Volatile rankings
Financial Times global ranking methodology is based on 20 different metrics, including some that are inclined to favor non-U.S. schools. Some metrics that add to a school’s position include the percentage of students, faculty, and trustees who possess passports from a country where the school is not located, whether students and alumni worked in foreign countries, whether students had international class experience, and whether the school has a requirement to learn an additional language before graduation.
A new metric was added this year – Corporate Social Responsibility. This metric has a weight of 3%, and is based on the percentage of teaching hours from core courses devoted to CSR, ethics, social, and environmental issues.
The FT’s most heavily weighted metric is salary data (40%). its use of “purchasing power parity”, or PPP favor schools whose grads go to work in countries with lower cost of living. This hurts U.S. schools since most grads of U.S. MBA programs want to live and work in the U.S.
The ranking does not take incoming student quality into account. GMAT and GRE scores, as well as undergraduate GPA’s, are ignored.
FT’s ranking is known to be volatile, which reduces its credibility because there are few year-to-year changes at schools that explain big changes in the rankings. This means that there were big winners and big losers again this year.
Twenty-seven of the 91 returning b-schools had double-digit increases or decreases in their standings. Fully half of the MBA programs ranked by FT five years ago (39 of 78) have felt double-digit changes, and 23 of those changes have been adjustments in 20 or more spots.
Top 25 International MBA Programs
| 2020 Rank | School | 2019 Rank | Y-O-Y Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Harvard | 2 | +1 |
| 2 | UPenn Wharton | 4 | +2 |
| 3 | Stanford GSB | 1 | -2 |
| 4 | INSEAD | 3 | -1 |
| 5 | CEIBS | 5 | --- |
| 6 | MIT Sloan | 8 | +2 |
| 7 | London | 6 | -1 |
| 8 | Columbia | 9 | +1 |
| 9 | HEC Paris | 19 | +10 |
| 10 | Chicago Booth | 7 | -3 |
| 11 | Northwestern Kellogg | 14 | +3 |
| 12 | UC-Berkeley Haas | 10 | -2 |
| 13 | IESE | 12 | -1 |
| 14 | Yale SOM | 11 | -3 |
| 15 | Nat’l Univ. of Singapore | 17 | +2 |
| 16 | Dartmouth Tuck | 15 | -1 |
| 17 | Duke Fuqua | 19 | +3 |
| 18 | Virginia Darden | 23 | +5 |
| 19 | Cambridge Judge | 16 | -3 |
| 19 | Hong Kong UST | 18 | -1 |
| 21 | Oxford Said | 13 | -8 |
| 22 | New York Stern | 25 | +3 |
| 23 | Cornell Johnson | 27 | +4 |
| 24 | ESADE | 21 | -3 |
| 25 | IMD | 22 | -3 |
| 25 | UCLA Anderson | 26 | +1 |
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