How Yale SOM Climbed Into The Top Ten

Yale School of Management Dean Ted Snyder

MOST IMPROVEMENTS AT YALE ARE NOT MEASURED BY THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Given the comparatively little weight attached to these gains–and the offsetting declines on more heavily weighted metrics– it’s hard to say with real certainty why Yale is back in The Financial Times’ Top Ten. Perhaps it’s because each school’s underlying index scores–which The FT does not reveal–are so close to each other as to be meaningless–even at the top of the 100 schools the newspaper is measuring.

It’s not that SOM hasn’t improved. It’s that most of its improvements are not captured by the FT ranking. Those include a new, experienced leadership team, exceptionally bright students with impressive GMAT scores (714) and undergraduate GPAs (3.57), a highly innovative integrated curriculum, one of the lowest student-faculty ratios of any top business school, the creation of that unique global partnership that has brought more international focus to SOM, and a brand new and wonderfully impressive $243 million home.

Of course, the ranking of every school occurs within an ever-changing, dynamic system where nothing stays the same. What often matters is not whether the figures went up or down, but whether they went up or down relative to others. Schools that had been ahead of Yale last year on different metrics could now have fallen behind. Their diminished performance could have as much to do with Yale’s ranking gains as Snyder’s strategy in making Yale the most global of the U.S. schools.

Yale SOM may very well deserve to be one of the Top Ten institutions in the world that grant an MBA degree–but mostly for reasons that aren’t entirely measured by The Financial Times.

MOST IMPROVEMENTS AT YALE ARE NOT MEASURED BY THE FINANCIAL TIMES

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