The Economist’s 2015 Big MBA Rankings’ Winners & Losers

Warwick Business School is an hour from London

Warwick Business School is an hour from London

Rankings give and they take. That’s why business schools have a love-hate relationship with them. They love a ranking when their MBA programs do better. And when their programs fall, the love affair ends rather abruptly.

The Economist‘s 2015 ranking of the best MBA programs in the world, published yesterday (Oct. 15), has plenty of fans and detractors, depending on the outcomes. Firmly in the fan category, there’s Warwick Business School which didn’t waste any time trumpeting the fact that The Economist ranked its full-time MBA program the best in the United Kingdom, fifth in Europe, and among the Top 20 in the world.

Warwick climbed 19 places to reach a rank of 18th in this year’s survey, significantly better than the more prestigious U.K. programs at London Business School, Cambridge Judge, or Oxford Said.

‘WARWICK’S SUCCESS IS THE CULMINATION OF FIVE YEARS OF STRATEGIC PLANNING’

Warwick Dean Mark Taylor said the school’s success “is the culmination of five years of strategic planning in WBS that has lifted us to the very top of the U.K. rankings and into the group of top 20 business schools in the world. The Economist‘s recognition of the Warwick MBA as the UK’s leading full-time MBA programme is echoed in the sustained, dramatic league table rises we have seen right across our portfolio of programmes in the last few years, such as the WBS Distance Learning MBA, which is also ranked number one in the UK. The staff, students and alumni of WBS can justifiably be proud of belonging to a truly world-class institution.”

You can’t blame him for taking a bow. Only two other schools had bigger improvements in this year’s ranking: The University of Florida’s Hough School of Business, which rose 22 spots to 58th best, and Macquarie University in Australia, which shot up 21 places to 28th.

Besides the obvious winners who made double-digit rises in the ranking, there are other schools who hadn’t been on last year’s list and found their way into the newest ranking. Among those are most notably Michigan State’s Broad School and the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management (see below). Generally MBA programs that pop up on the list at such high ranks as Broad and Carlson, 35th and 55th respectively, are those that either declined to participate in the past or were disqualified for lack of adequate data by The Economist in the previous year.

(See following page for the schools that dropped the most or completely disappeared off the new ranking)