Poets and Quants

IE Business School

When it comes to business school rankings, the general belief is that they are pretty stable over time. The tops schools rarely move in any big fashion and it’s almost impossible to crack into a top ten position. But that general rule doesn’t apply to Madrid’s highly innovative IE Business School.

Little more than a decade ago, in 2002, the school was ranked 35th on The Financial Times’ global MBA list and ninth in Europe behind Italy’s SDA Bocconi, Britain’s Oxford and Cambridge, and Spain’s IESE. Six years later, IE cracked the top ten of the FT ranking, placing eighth worldwide and third in Europe behind only London Business School and INSEAD. Ever since, IE Business School  has ranked as high as sixth and never lower than eighth place worldwide.

The rise can largely be attributed to a highly market-oriented strategy that caught some rivals by surprise. IE doesn’t play by the normal rules of academia. The school’s leadership is entrepreneurial and innovative, pioneering degrees and programs that meet the demands of the marketplace–not of tenured professors who despise change. The school was among the first in the world, for example, to offer an online MBA program.

IE offers a full-time MBA in 13 months. The program is held on IE’s central-Madrid campus in Spain and is aimed at postgraduates who have undertaken studies and professional activities in a wide range of fields yet seek to sharpen their management skills. Almost all of IE Business School’s classes employ the case method to drive the learning experience, though professors also use other techniques such as role-playing, multimedia applications, and online business simulations. Students are assigned to small working groups designed to maximize diversity in which they discuss and prepare cases and complete assignments.

The school’s LAUNCH module kicks-off the program and develops participants’ personal and interpersonal skills through workshops in areas such as team-building, critical thinking, cross-cultural communication, creativity, and decision-making. This is followed by the Core Period in which courses on quantitative analysis, economics, marketing, accounting, and organizational behavior lay the foundation for the rest of the program.

The International MBA offers a host of options, which allow students to personalize their MBA to maximize its benefit based on individual interests and aspirations. IE offers Exchange Programs, a selection of elective options, entrepreneurial projects within the Venture Lab, Dual Degree Programs with Tufts and MIT, and an international partnership with Wharton. The school also boasts what is arguably the most prestigious Global MBA Online degree available, entering four cohorts a year of 32 students each, three in English and one in Spanish.

Latest Up-to-Date MBA Rankings:

Poets&Quants (2012): 4 (non-U.S.)
BusinessWeek (2012): 3 (international)
Forbes (2011): 3 (international)
Financial Times (2012): 8 (global), 3 (Europe)
The Economist: (2012) 22 (global), 7 (Europe)

Rankings Analysis: As noted earlier, IE has managed to do what very few business schools have done: crack into the top ten of a widely watched global MBA ranking. PoetsandQuants’ composite ranking for the school is revealing. When you combine all the results of the most influential rankings in the world, IE still comes out very high–fourth among schools outside the U.S. That ranking does not include the recently published 2013 list by The Financial Times which saw IE slip three spots to a global rank of 11.

As one Class of 2012 graduate told BusinessWeek on the magazine’s survey: “IE Business School is unique because it’s a global top-ten school but the students, alumni, and faculty are down-to-earth, interesting, and genuinely nice people. The personality of IE is what really drew me to their MBA program over the others I was considering. I also like the entrepreneurial spirit at IE. My experiences there taught me how to solve problems creatively, a skill that is useful both in a big firm setting and in small firm/start-up business environments.”

Tuition & Fees: $76,800
Average GMAT: 680
GMAT Range: 640-760
Average GPA: NA
Acceptance Rate: 33%

Full-Time Enrollment: 440
International: 89%
Female: 29%
Minority: NA
Mean Age: 28

Mean Base Salary: $102,500
Median Signing Bonus: NA
Percentage of MBAs with Job Offers at Graduation: 30%
Percentage of MBAs with Job Offers Three Months Later: 90%

Class of 2012 Top Employers:

McKinsey: 11
Johnson & Johnson: 7
Grupo Telefonica: 7
Accenture: 7
PriceWaterhouseCoopers: 6

Where the Class of 2012 Went to Work:

Financial Services: 19%
Consulting: 18%
Consumer Products: 14%