FT Ranks MiM Degrees But Forgets The U.S.

As many as 50 business schools in the U.S. now offer an increasingly popular one-year degree called the Master’s In Management, but you won’t find any of them on the new ranking published today (Sept. 15) by The Financial Times. Even though such powerhouse U.S. schools as MIT, Duke, Michigan, Northwestern, USC and Notre Dame have the MiM in their degree portfolios, none of them make the FT’s list of the 70 ranked schools.

There’s 18 different schools in France, including the No. 2 overall program at HEC Paris. There are 11 in the United Kingdom, a half dozen in Germany, and a pair of the Indian Institutes of Management in India. There’s even one MiM program ranked by the FT in Russia at St. Petersburg State University Graduate School of Management. But nowhere to be found is a single U.S. business school.

MANY OF THE U.S. PROGRAMS ARE TOO NEW TO MAKE THE FT LIST

So why are American schools a no-show on the list? The FT bans programs that have not run for at least four years and most of the U.S. versions of this degree are relatively new. At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, for example, the program with 30 students is only in its second year and has been restricted to the university’s liberal arts grads. This coming July, Kellogg will open it up to graduates outside Northwestern and move the program into downtown Chicago where it could accommodate as many as 200 students.

Just as the MBA is quintessentially an American degree, the one-year master’s in management is more typically a European invention. Even at MIT Sloan, which welcomed its first class for a master of science in management studies in 2009, the program got its start from a number of international schools, including HEC Paris and Tsinghua University. MIT’s partners for its program have since expanded to include INSEAD, IE Business School, and Fudan University. At MIT, it’s largely a program for a select group of top international MBA students who want to do advanced research in a specific area of management.

Increasingly, though, more U.S. schools are moving into the one-year degree market. Duke University’s Fuqua School ran a pilot ten-month master’s in management studies for the first time in 2009 and now has two of the programs, including a Duke Kunshan University program for Chinese students. Students in the Kunshan version spend the first two terms on the U.S. campus in Durham, NC, and then move to China for the last three terms on the Duke Kunshan University campus.

THE TOTAL COST FOR DUKE’S MASTER IN MANAGEMENT STUDIES: $74,357

The experience provides basic entry-level business skills to students with little to no prior career experience in 15 business courses taught over five terms. The typical class at Duke has 110 students, with an average age of 23 and less than six months of work experience. These programs tend to draw a larger number of women than MBA programs. At Duke, women make up half the class. But they don’t come cheap: The total cost of the Duke program, including estimated living expenses, is $74,357.

Initially, many B-school observers thought the degree would cannibalize the full-time MBA market. Early indications show that is not true. The FT, in reporting out today’s story on the new ranking, noted that earlier graduates of the MiM program at the London Business School (LBS), which enrolled its first class in 2009, are now in the full-time MBA programs at Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Chicago Booth, and INSEAD.

Indian-born Parul Dubey, who used her MiM degree from LBS to land a job with Pimco in London, just started her second year as an MBA student at the Harvard Business School. “I believe I got the best of both worlds,” she told the FT. “LBS is in London, the financial capital of the world, and the business school is much more diverse. Harvard is a very different value-add,” she says. “The case method has taught me to be a better listener. It has enabled me to put forward an argument and defend it in a class of people.”

METHODOLOGY BASED ON 16 METRICS FROM SCHOOL AND ALUMNI SURVEYS

The British newspaper’s new ranking of the best programs, however incomplete due to the absence of a single U.S. school, is based on surveys completed by the schools and the alumni of the programs. This year a record 81 schools participated. It’s not known if any U.S. schools bothered to complete surveys for the FT, but 11 of the participating schools failed to make the ranking.For a school to be eligible for the ranking, at least 20% of alumni had to respond, with a minimum of 20 responses. The FT said 6,142 alumni responded, 37% of the graduates contacted.

In all, 16 different metrics are used by the newspaper to crank out its ranking, ranging from the average salary of respondents, adjusted by purchasing power parity, to a program’s exposure to international business. This is the

The winner of this year’s ranking is in Switzerland, the University of St. Gallen, which was No. 1 last year as well. It is followed by HEC Paris, which gained two spots from the previous year, No. 3 Essec Business School in France, and No 4. WHU Bersheim in Germany. The only North American school in the ranking, the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School, is in Canada.

Among the Top 20, EMLyon Business School in France experienced the biggest tumble of the ranking, falling 11 places to a rank of 20 from 9 last year. Imperial College Business School in the U.K. dropped seven spots to a rank of 19th from 12th. The Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, jumped six places to a rank of 13th, the best improvement among the Top 20 programs.

(See following page for the table of the top 20 programs)