Canada’s Ivey Tops 2015 BW International MBA Ranking

Ivey Business School

For the second consecutive year, the Richard Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario captured the top spot in Bloomberg Businessweek‘s ranking of the best MBA programs outside the U.S. In taking first place, Ivey beat out such big guns in international business education as London Business School, INSEAD, Cambridge and Oxford.

Though ranked 97th by The Financial Times and 66th by The Economist, Ivey’s stellar showing on the Businessweek list is largely the result of an employer survey–which is weighted most heavily in the ranking–that put Ivey first among all international MBA programs. The school was 11th in both salary and employment, 11th in the magazine’s survey of recently graduated students, and 18th in a new heavily weighted alumni survey.

Right on Ivey’s heels was the London Business School, with the two schools separated by a mere .9 on the underlying index scores that are the basis for the numerical ranks assigned to MBA programs. Ivey was at 100 followed by London’s 99.1. In third place was INSEAD, with an index score of 93.65, No. 4 IE Business School, and No. 5 IMD.

THE WINNERS & LOSERS INCLUDE….

Among the 29 ranked MBA programs outside the U.S., the biggest falls were suffered by the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin. ESMT dropped 12 places to finish 15th from third only a year ago, while the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology both fell seven places. Rotman slid to 18th from 11th, while HKUST skidded to 25th from 18th.

On the plus side of the equation, this year’s biggest winners were ESADE, up eight places, to rank 11th from 19th a year earlier, and Manchester Business School in the U.K., which jumped seven spots to land at 19, up from 26 in 2014.

The 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking features a new methodology that diminishes the influence of the magazine’s long-standing surveys to the latest graduating class and adds the viewpoints of alumni from three separate classes: 2007, 2008, and 2009. Businessweek also added two key components of U.S. News’ ranking: starting salary and employment, though it used year-old data for this portion of the survey. In common with last year’s ranking, this list also excludes any measurement of the intellectual capital of a school’s faculty. All told, however, Businessweek says that it gathered data from more than 13,150 current students, 18,540 alumni, and 1,460 recruiters across 177 B-school programs. “The result is our deepest and broadest set of data ever,” according to the publication.

FIVE DIFFERENT SCHOOLS CLAIMED FIVE NO. 1 RANKINGS

No school dominated all of the five components of the Businessweek ranking. While Ivey topped the employer list, the University of Oxford’s  Saïd Business School came in first in the new alumni survey of graduates six to eight years out. SDA Bocconi in Italy, Spain’s IE Business School, the National University of Singapore, and Switzerland’s IMD rounded out the top five.

Canfield Business School led the magazine’s survey of recently graduated students, followed by IE, IMD, INSEAD and Cambridge University’s Judge Business School. IMD, largely because its graduates are among the oldest in the MBA world, topped the list for starting salary. INSEAD was second, London Business School third, with HEC Paris fourth and IE Business School fifth. And the National University of Singapore came out No. 1 in employment three months after graduation, followed by No. 2 University of St. Gallen, No. 3 London Business School, No. 4 IE, and No. 5 CEIBS in China.

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