Ranking Ivey below Schulich, HEC, McGill, and Sauder? Anybody in the business community and is Canadian would agree that the top business schools in Canada are Ivey and Queen’s. Their business network and alumni are unmatched by any other schools especially in finance and consulting. No wonder people don’t trust the rankings. They can’t be taken seriously!

Having read the discussion here, I tend to agree with the research and insights from Vladimir.

I’ve got an admit from Cambridge with a bursary, but I don’t think I’ll be going there. Below are my observations.

When at Cambridge, we had a number of interactions with the current students over a dinner and a lunch the following day. I asked them quite a few questions including the highlights/lowlights. In general, they were positive on everything. However, one of them was a bit shaky when I asked about the quality of the career services, he also mentioned that one of the lecturers was not really good. The mention of the lecturer didn’t really raise red flags at that point with me as I suppose all schools have bad and good lecturers.

One of the points Cambridge is trying to sell is that it’s a university-based school. Since every student needs to sign-up for one of the 31 colleges, it also allows MBA students to interact outside of the MBA student circle with people studying at Cambridge physics, philosophy, economics, you name it. However, when I asked several students how much they have used and benefited from this college system, 50% or more said that they simply didn’t have the time.

In parallel to this, my friend’s observation was that it felt like students we were meeting all behaved like Jehovah’s witnesses on a mission (no offence intended, if you’re religious).

To finish off the interview day, we had an afternoon tea session with the current students. Here’s what I found out accidentally.

There are intermittent problems with the facilities in the main school building, e.g. internet access not working, heating not working. By the way, I’ve also noticed when sitting in one of the amphitheatres that someone hadn’t designed the seating properly and I barely had a desk area where I was seated.
The 30% of the professors are good, but then there is 30% that are so bad that only 5% of the students ends up attending (might be an exaggeration, but still!). The bad professors are not fired, but rather the number of their hours for the next year is shortened.
All of the Career Services but one were fired last year, however, the new team is just as weak as the previous one. I then remembered a joke a Career Services person made during her presentation when asked if they did anything to place students individually, she responded that they were not on commission to do that. Just to give some contrast, Cranfield Career Services said they work with individual students trying to find them a job without even being prompted.
One student in the current year left with a scandal because he/she didn’t like the programme but also didn’t fit in with the rest of the class
The class is not very bonded as a group, although better than the previous year. Partially, this is due to the fact the student committee didn’t have the time in the first 3 months to organize any activities because its members didn’t have the time
Many students do complain officially, but not much is done about it. It also reminded me a comment from an ex-Cambridge MBA student, who was generally positive about Cambridge and the one I was put in touch with by the Adcom after interview invite. He mentioned that there were a lots of people complaining and focusing on negative sides only in his year whereas he thought that it was too much complaining.
Students are instructed by the faculty and the MBA director not to complain in public or to the applicants as they say it will affect the school reputation and ultimately the current students. So, they are sort of being held hostage Perhaps, this is the same with other programs?!! in this case, I really wonder about the ethics every MBA program focuses so much on these days. It sounds like one of those pyramid schemes when whoever is in the scheme needs to recruit more people or otherwise the whole pyramid collapses.
Overall the program is very raw and one should only go for it if they want to have a Cambridge brand to brag about to their friends, relatives and general public who have low awareness of the MBA programs. Here, the Cambridge brand is much stronger than that of many better ranked schools. This may be a reason why there were soo many Americans on the interview day. That said, Oxford apparently has better brand in the States.

Vladimir and John A. Byrne,

I know that it may be painful for you(US-centrists), but top European schools(especially LBS/INSEAD) are as good as top US schools (excluding H/S). Whether you like it or not. The employment reports can tell different story from what you are trying to sell here. 

I liked the phrase from the link below, quote: ****It’s one of the cardinal rules of consulting – don’t accept opinions and conjecture if hard data is available that can provide the indisputable answer!****

It would be wise for prospective students to follow this rule!

Sorry I forget to mention one important thing: the first accreditation body for business education is AACSB in US, the others are: AMBA in UK and EQUIS in europe. I want prospective students to check which one is hard to gain, which one is every school proud of? whcih one sets rules of business education? then, you’ll get the answer

US economy will continue growing, simply because there are NO alternatives with same competitiveness factors. china economy is not free, it is controlled by the ruling party, we all know that. Yes, when they have clear, fair, and equal rules and regulations, a true free market, by other words democratic system, then they will be really strong competitor to the US. (in my opinion, and based on historical events and chinese wise culture, I think they will do so in the future)..

sorry, INSEAD is in its own league..globalization in business education..diversity and multi-cultural dimensions and multi-languages requirement..are all invented by INSEAD long time ago, and now mant top B schools follow INSEAD steps and learn from it..LBS is good school but far behind INSEAD..the only school that can come close to INSEAD is HBS,…the others need decades to catch up..

from your nickname “LondonBanker”, you see business as finance only. sorry but it is not. B school is for management education NOT finance education. However, INSEAD placements in Finance is far better than any other european school. PE in whole europe is controlled by INSEAD grads followed by St Gallen. Wharton previous name was Wharton school of FINANCE..so no surprise for its superiority in this field and it has been existing for 130 years..if MONEY is only the criteria then INSEAD beats again, check out their placement last year and see where is the highest salaries? BRAZIL, yes brazil..thats mean INSEAD can serve you everywhere but LBS is concentrated in cannary wharf, yet, it doesn’t stand against INSEAD by any measure..
what do you think Mckinsey would hire 127 grads, Bain 48, BCG 60 and Goldman 28 in a single year ?
anyway: the best thread ever I read about INSEAD vs Harvard is in the link below, see the last comment, it is probably the most credible statement ever..
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/insead-vs-harvard 

I of course don’t see business as finance only. I needed a nickname for the site and chose one in like 5 seconds. You say PE is controlled by INSEAD. Can you back that up with facts. I believe on the last career report that LBS sent more kids on a % basis to PE/VC than INSEAD. Feel free to call me out on that if I am wrong. INSEAD definitely give you bang for your buck, but at the same time, ROI is much higher for a one year program. If INSEAD was a two year program, it would not seem so cheap anymore and not as attractive to many candidates. Again, I noticed that you mainly cited consulting numbers with the exception of Goldman; the consulting numbers are fantastic I agree. However, how many of the MBB types were sponsored by their firms to do an MBA and essentially have a “come back and work for us” offer? The real number for McKinsey placement (Excluding sponsored candidates) is more like 67. Again, feel free to call me you if you think my info is inaccurate

While the last post was very well written, I have issues with blanket statement like “INSEAD is strong in European PE” without citing statistics. In fact, if you read closely, the writer of the comments agrees with me that having a 1 year program gives INSEAD a competitive advantage.”International” and “Career Progress” are not effective filter. In this day and age, many people have traveled and worked in other countries. Many of the students who apply to top biz school have solid international experience. The way that he mentions “career progress” troubles me. Surely it’s possible to get promoted multiple times in a boutique firm, but is it really higher quality than someone who only got 1 promotion at a more competitive firm like Golman/McKinsey?

And even I feel like an asshole for saying the next comment. The writer didn’t even apply to HBS. Could it be that he think HBS on the whole is more competitive for him and didn’t bother? GPA and Leadership and much harder criteria than international experience and career progress.But, I don’t want to make this an HBS vs INSEAD thread.

I hope that I have not offended you in any way and welcome rebuttals/counterarguments from you

Cheers,
LondonBanker

A few points as a neutral person in North America with a few insights:

I applied to and got into insead among a few other top MBA programs in the US including Dartmouth Tuck and HBS. Obviously I’m matriculating at HBS and only got rejected by Stanford.

1) Although I initially considered LBS, I didn’t apply to LBS because it really is like NYU except that it’s less established and is located in London, not NYC as someone exactly pointed in the above post. There was no value added.

2) The fact that insead sends 127 to McKinsey alone is huge regardless whether 60 were sponsored or not because McKinsey or other leading firms only sponsor top performers and if one is a top performer at McKinsey, usually he/she gets into other top MBA programs. It ironically further helps insead’s reputation as one of the best bschools. Even without these sponsored students, no other bschool sends 67 (total mckinsey hires minus the sponsored) out of 8xx (reported class size minus the sponsored) to McKinsey alone. McKinsey by the way will never joke around by wasting their high performers in an MBA program they believe is not value added.

3) As a former Blackrock PE analyst, I’ll tell you that PE/VC firms do not recruit heavily at bschools. Usually recruiting happens through personal connection/lots of networking in addition to having relevant work exp in IB or PE etc. That speaks volumes about why PE/VC hiring % is so low at all bschools. LBS is a much smaller school in terms of class size. Therefore, even if INSEAD’s % might have been reported lower, the actual number might be greater. PE/VC hiring is again through personal efforts rather than through career services center.

4) I wouldn’t discount insead’s MBA program advantage like you did. Insead was one of the first who came to the market with one year MBA program, firstly due to the European master’s program usually lasting one year. In fact, Kellogg and other leading bschools are following suit. You try to make it sound like people are applying to INSEAD only because it’s a one year program. That is not true. Sure, it can be an advantage for multiple reasons but that is not why INSEAD is perceived better than LBS nor is it true that LBS would have been perceived better otherwise.
Just FYI: I myself and a few friends I went to my undergrad with (one of HYP) consider insead a better school than LBS and on par with HSW.

To make fair analyses on various fronts,

- LBS does not even disclose how many of 39 were sponsored. So chances are LBS’ numbers are actually not as good as INSEAD’s.

- The self-selection may be at play in terms of PE/VC recruiting at HSW and INSEAD. What I mean is while I am certain PE/VC people do go to INSEAD, I am not certain the % of people who have worked in PE/VC at INSEAD is greater than the % of those at HBS. 

However, for the sake of our debate/analyses, looking at HBS, INSEAD and LBS employment reports,

HBS sent 14% of their grads to PE/VC
INSEAD sent 20% of their grads to Finance and of the 20%, 24% went to PE/VC, which equates to 5%,
LBS sent 7% to PE/VC.

From the above, it is clear that HBS sends its grads to PE/VC a lot more than INSEAD or LBS. But as I said earlier, this may very well have to do with more people with prior experience in PE/VC at HBS than INSEAD or LBS. The numbers do not tell us this.

Between INSEAD and LBS, 2% difference in terms of percentage may very well not hold any statistical significance. And of course, in absolute numbers, INSEAD did send more grads to PE/VC (about twice more).

- INSEAD is known as a general management school while LBS is known as more of a finance school like NYU. For this very reason along with other reasons I stated previously, I did not apply to LBS nor NYU nor Wharton. Had I been interested in finance-focused schools, I would have applied to Wharton, Columbia, NYU, Chicago and maybe LBS, but as an American possibly with a US bias, I don’t see how LBS is better than NYU. 

General management schools educate leaders with a broader sense of understanding of business. And usually, top general management schools are extremely strong at sending their grads to consulting firms because consulting work requires an overall understanding of business.

If I have to pick 5 top schools that have general management programs, I’d pick HBS, Stanford, INSEAD, Dartmouth Tuck and Yale.

Hope this makes sense to you.

Best,
HBS2014

Actually, many of INSEAD applicants I hear only apply to INSEAD. There is a HBS case on this written by HBS faculty. Your argument that HSW would s”uck up a large portion” of the high quality students in the three languages pool is baseless, although I am sure there are some who apply to HSW + INSEAD + LBS and other top American schools.

In the next
year I am going to apply to 5 schools H/S/W/LBS/MIT and I have made thorough research
on these schools, + INSEAD and some others. In Europe I was considering only two schools LBS and INSEAD. Why I decided to apply to LBS
over INSEAD:

 INSEAD is said to be consulting school but
when it comes to top consulting firms there is a little difference between INSEAD
and LBS. Lets look at the leaders in consulting and finance, taking into
account that INSEAD’s class size is 2.5 times class size of LBS.

Mckinsey

INSEAD 127

LBS 39
taking class size into account = 97

Difference =
30%

Goldman Sachs

LBS 8 which
translates to 20

INSEAD 6

Difference
= 233%

If we look
at schools as a whole, without considering different fields, then LBS wins
again.

I looked at
salary information right after graduation and 3 to 5 years later. In all three categories
LBS is the winner. If someone doubts my words I can post links to LBS and
INSEAD Employment reports and to FT statistics (3 years after graduation
salary) and Forbes statistics (five years after graduation salary). 

Then I
looked at percentage increase in salary five years after graduation as compared
to pre-MBA level (as reported by Forbes). LBS 190% increase INSEAD 164%
increase.

Yale needs at least 8 to 10 years to be on par with M7 schools. has the potential? definitely yes, perhaps the only school to have such potential to be on par with HSW, but need time..I know yale, they really need to address the quality of the students and increase the class size. students are very high hard skills but unfortunately obvious low soft skills.. you can easily notice this from the first visit.. as general management, I would say the best 10 programs worldwide ( in order): HBS, (INSEAD, Stanford), or, (Stanford, INSEAD), Dartmouth, Ross, IMD (don’t underestimate this school when it comes to general management and leadership development), Duke, Kellogg, Sloan, and Haas. 

There are assumption biases with your claims.

Students may be more interested in consulting than finance at INSEAD.

LBS is known as a finance school. In fact, 8 to Goldman Sachs is a disappointingly small number, given their strength in finance than anything else.

Also, INSEAD has two intakes as far as I know (July intake and December intake). GS is an investment bank and for them, a summer internship is a must, which INSEAD also tells its students publicly. Students applying for the December intake can go on a summer internship, albeit short while July intake students cannot. Therefore, LBS and INSEAD, in terms of investment bank placement numbers, there is no more of a difference of 233% you put out there. It’s the same.

Lastly, your salary information is flawed because what you do not know is how high one’s salary was before MBA. If INSEAD MBA students were making more money than LBS students prior to MBA, then % increase is going to be less no matter where they end up. Even if your claim were true, LBS being a finance school, people won’t be surprised if their finance grads pull up the average salary.

I wouldn’t apply to LBS. Just apply to HSW. LBS is not worth it.

I would advise against applying to MIT as well. First of all, it’s right across HBS. Can you stand being so close to #1 school, living in your inferiority complex? Secondly, it’s a school that tends to attract techy nerds, not business leaders.

No, sorry they aren’t. I advice you to go to the campus and have a chat with them. and see if they can read the global map. (NOT ALL of Them). they are simply High IQ and very low EQ. Mr Snyder should address this immediately..

I wouldn’t even go to any bschool outside of Top 10 in the US. You are talking shit.

I get the feeling you are a Duke or Ross MBA from Russia, who tries to badmouth all the other top schools so that your own school gets recognized better. That’s sad.

don’t worry. they will set up a private b school only for you. u know the person who grew up with such “sh**” words and mindset needs private medication..

look from my experince, ALL the good programs in US and Europe will give a good education in the basic management disciplines. so, when people ( wise people) talk about fit, they really mean it. let say, you are best fit for Ross and you liked it, BUT have admission from HBS or INSEAD while you don’t really feel comfortable with them; the assure thing (by experiment and recruiters) is that you will be performing far better in Ross than in HBS, and hence your satisfaction will be directly reflected on your attitude on the job market and will you will be more competitive to get your dream job, and therefore the probability to be successful is higher. I am saying that because I talked with many Mckinsey people (principals and partners), and with a VP of the Goldman Sachs in London, all of them assured the fit factor and satisfaction and be careful to be taken by the emotion. Yes, HBS obviously still the golden brand for the MBAs but this is in general speaking and not for the professional people who really know what are they doing.  do visit schools, talk with students, faculty, alumni, recruiters, and attend seminars and workshops and make your decision clear. INSEAD has some very competitive advantages such as ONE year with the same opportunities of TWO years, three languages, global outlook, and exchange between many countries. Stanford has the silicon valley  advantages, Wharton has the finance heritage, Dartmouth has the intimate bonding and loyalty, IMD has the very personal approach for leadership development, Duke has the health care, Yale has the non-profit, and so on…Look what you really need with very realistic approach. Dream yes, but keep your foot on the ground. For me as I told, I am not totally fan of ranking but ranking count 10 to 20 % of my weighing the school, 80 to 90 % is really on my needs, characteristics, and where I feel comfortable.  and when the MBB or any white shoe recruiter see that you picked the school based on these real factor, believe me your chance of getting the job is much much higher than the one who just stuck with branding and propaganda… best of luck.. ( I am proudly won the battle of my emotion, and turned down Stanford for INSEAD, not because the INSEAD is better than Stanford as a whole business school, NO, BUT because INSEAD is far better for me. at the end of the day, employers will not hire stanford, they will hire me.. though I agree that Stanford has the brand, heritage, and prestige that really can’t be ignored, BUT down the road I have to learn to take the most important decisions for my life ONLY based on realistic and mature bases..

Needing some overseas advice: I have been researching E MBA one year and part time programs throughout Europe for a couple weeks.  As a 15 year business professional, 10 years as an entrepreneur owning three companies and shareholder in three additional companies I consulted as chief business architect, I have taken the last 6 months off from pure exhaustion.  Now refreshed, I have decided I wish to receive an EMBA to further my business skills and network, as I begin to craft my next company focused on venture investment, development and consultancy in technology, multimedia, digital and social content. I have looked at INSEAD, Oxford Said, LBU (consulting focus), IE, IESE, ESADE, CBS (innovation) and Aalto (innovation & close to Tallinn).  My intention is to round out my business and financial acumen as leadership (understand for the last 10 years I have had employees handling these areas while I could focus on leadership, new business development, innovation and marketing & branding). My timing doesn’t seem perfect as most schools have just begun their session. However, I plan to leave, as I have for the past months my business in the hands of my partners. During my time in Europe, I also desire to employ my skills within the European environment so I can continue to learn culture and standards (as I have spent more than 8 years of my life outside of the states with much appreciation and reverence for global understanding).

Your suggests are more than welcome.  As a business owner I have found the best advice has been received from those outside my inner circle. I look forward to responses as I continue to live life and business inquisitive and humble, which has afforded me tremendous opportunities. My Best….

what a ridiculous comment. I am an American. I applied to LBS and didn’t even consider Insead. nonetheless, they are both great schools and are both at par in terms of quality and prestige.

only apply to HSW? WTH? I bet you can’t even get an interview at MIT Sloan. What an arrogant comment. Elite B schools certainly should weed out cocky and arrogant applicants like you. All top schools (Top 10 US, LBS/Insead.. and etc) should be respected.