Della Bradshaw Leaving The Financial Times

INSEAD tops Bradshaw’s last ranking for the Financial Times

In a video interview, she confessed to being “slightly relieved” that this latest ranking is her last.

“Back in about 1998 we were looking at doing this,” she said. “It is quite difficult to remember the atmosphere then but we were coming up to the millenium and what we were looking at is which business schoolls are going to create the global managers for the 21st century. Our rankings are very different to what the other rankings out there are. First of all, they were global, instead of just being focused on the U.S. Secondly, we ranked on diversity. It wasn’t just global diversity or nationality. It was things like international mobility and gender. One of the things people were outraged (about) at the time was that we looked at the number of women students in programs and the number of women professors and we ranked according to that. Looking back on that, we were quite prescient in some of those things.”

What also caused controversy was that the results of the FT’s global MBA ranking are dependent on a methodology that does not measure the quality of incoming students and also makes significant adjustments to graduate outcomes that inflate the compensation of those who work in poor countries with high levels of poverty. The FT ranking, for example, does not consider GMAT scores, grade point averages, or acceptance rates of schools in measuring quality–fairly standard metrics to judge the caliber of incoming students. If it did, non-U.S. schools would suffer greatly in the FT ranking.

And when the newspaper computes graduate compensation, which accounts for 40% of the methdology’s weight, it relies on self-reported data from alumni three years out of school and then adjusts the numbers for purchasing power and career choice. Those adjustments inflate the pay of schools in emerging economies and put many North American schools at a disadvantage in the FT‘s ranking.

In her video interview, Bradshaw revealed that “we adjust the rankings slightly every year to better measure what we are trying to achieve but basically there are three elementn to them: How well do graduates do, how diverse are these programs in training global managers, and (a measure of the) intellectual capital of the business schools in research and Phd programs.”

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