London Business School vs. UPenn’s Wharton

London is the only business school in the world with its own private entrance to a British pub.

On-Campus Recruiting: London and Wharton get some of the world’s most favored employers to recruit their students: McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs. Surprisingly, though, given the global nature of the top financial and consulting firms, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Deloitte Consulting were nowhere to be seen at London. They were all in force at Wharton as you can see in the table below. We give Wharton a clear edge over London in recruiting, given the school’s highly consistent superior showing in BusinessWeek’s recruiter polls. In the 2008-2009 year, 243 companies interviewed graduating MBAs on campus, 1,623 employers posted jobs on the school’s MBA Job Board, and 199 bought Wharton’s online resume books.

Alumni Network: Wharton claims the largest alumni network of any business school in the world: 85,000 alums in 140 countries. That figure includes Wharton’s sizable undergraduate output. It’s a sure bet that wherever you are in the world, you’ll find Wharton MBAs or even a Wharton Alumni Club to use as a networking base. London claims more than 30,000 alums in “over 130 countries” and alumni clubs in cities from Atlanta to Zurich. Obviously, London Business School can play the underdog in just about any other city in the world with the exception of London. The esprit de corps of London grads is considerable, however, giving us the impression that this is a strong network to leverage on your behalf.

Rankings:

London Business School has made a lot of progress in rankings over the past few years. Most notably, it came in first in The Financial Times’ global ranking of the best full-time MBA programs for 2010, after tying Wharton for first in the previous year. Forbes, which has a separate ranking for non-U.S. schools with two-year MBA programs, also ranks it first in that category. Many of the numbers in the table below are not directly comparable because several of the ranking organizations separate out the U.S. schools from the non-U.S. schools where there is obviously less competition. The P&Q rank–which factors into consideration all the major rankings weighted by their individual authority–places London first among all non-U.S. institutions. These are the up-to-date rankings from each ranking organization.

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