FT Adds Rankings For B-Schools In Americas, Asia-Pacific

MIT’s Sloan School of Management moved up from third to second place in The Financial Times’ “mashup” ranking of B-schools in the Americas. No. 1, once again this year, was the Wharton School. MIT photo

For the second year in a row, The Financial Times has added top-25 lists of business schools in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region to go with its annual ranking of European schools. In the rankings of schools based on multiple programs including MBA, EMBA, and open and customized executive education, this year, like last year, The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania topped the Americas list, with MIT’s Sloan School of Management rising one spot to second and Columbia Business School slipping one to third. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business maintained its No. 4 position, tied with Michigan’s Ross School of Business, which was No. 5 last year.

In the Asia-Pacific ranking, Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University takes the top spot, followed by China’s CEIBS at No. 2, the National University of Singapore Business School at No. 3, the top Indian Institute of Management, at Ahmedabad, at No. 4, and HKUST Business School, of Hong Kong, at No. 5.

The remaining top 10 spots in the FT‘s Americas ranking all belong to U.S. schools, from No. 6 UCLA Anderson to No. 7 Duke Fuqua, No. 8 Washington  Olin, No. 9 Stanford GSB, to No. 10 Harvard Business School. It’s not until No. 11 that we see a school from outside the U.S.: Incae Business School of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, tied with Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. In all, 20 of the 25 spots in the ranking are U.S. schools; besides Incae, which maintained its No. 11 ranking from last year because of the strength of its customized and open executive education offerings, the Americas ranking includes three Canadian schools (No. 13 Toronto Rotman, No. 14 Western Ivey, and No. 18 Queen’s Smith, none of which saw any improvement in their station from last year) and IPADE, of Mexico, at No. 17. That’s a two-point climb for the Mexico City-based school from 2017. (See The Financial Times‘s 2018 Americas ranking below, and its Asia-Pacific ranking on Page 2.)

U.S. B-SCHOOL DECLINE EXAGGERATED, FT SAYS

So, as good a school as it is, how is Washington Olin ranked higher here than Stanford and Harvard? FT explains that those elite schools are missing key programs that are used to determine a school’s overall score. Stanford may have topped the FT‘s vaunted global MBA ranking this year, but it lacks a part-time EMBA program; Harvard, meanwhile, doesn’t offer an EMBA at all. This calculus is why Rutgers Business School made the list at No. 24: FT has ranked the Rutgers MBA as only No. 89, but its open executive education offering is ranked much higher. Or look at Michigan Ross, which has an MBA ranked by FT as only 26th globally, but its open-enrollment exec ed courses are rated second-best in the Americas. In a similar vein, unlike in its larger list of European schools (which has 95 total schools), FT does not included Master in Management programs in its calculations for schools in the Americas (though it does include them for the Asia-Pacific schools). The reason is simple: Too few schools in the region even offer these programs.

FT takes pains to note that all the new entries on the 2018 Americas ranking are U.S. schools: No. 20 Emory Goizueta, No. 21 Arizona State Carey, No. 23 Cornell Johnson, and, tied at No. 24, Maryland Smith and Rutgers. This the newspaper considers a sign that the health of U.S. business education has been undervalued. “While the traditional full-time MBA has been in decline, other areas of business education are growing,” the paper writes. “Shorter and more specialist business master’s degrees have been the success story of recent years. So has executive education, reflected on this list.” Nor have many alternatives to U.S. business schools emerged, at least not in the same hemisphere.

In the Asia-Pacific ranking, CEIBS is notable for placing second overall despite its place in the FT global ranking as the top school in Asia. Yet here CEIBS loses out to its Shanghai neighbor Jiao Tong because the latter has the top spot in MiM, customized exec ed, and open exec ed, and is No. 4 in EMBA. CEIBS is third in EMBA, second and fifth, respectively, in the two exec ed categories, and doesn’t offer a MiM degree. Another interesting wrinkle: Japan placed a school on the list, finally gaining some attention after decades of second-tier status in business education. Nagoya University of Commerce and Business is a private college with a part-time executive MBA that is popular across Asia, earning it a spot at No. 25.