New M7 Data, Familiar Magnificence

Surprise, surprise: Harvard remains the elite of the elite, sharing No. 1 in both the Poets&Quants 2018 ranking and the U.S. News 2019 ranking. File photo

How The M7 Rank Against Each Other

One fact of business school life can be counted on year to year: The M7 schools will be at or near the top in every ranking. Here at Poets&Quants, all seven schools are in the top eight in our 2018 ranking, just as they were last year, with Wharton sharing the top spot this year with Harvard; it’s a similar case for the most recent rankings by U.S. News, Forbes, and Bloomberg Businessweek, in which none of the seven schools drops below ninth place. That’s not the case for the Financial Times, which does a global ranking that includes schools outside the U.S., nor the Economist, which has a puzzling and questionable methodology. In the newest FT ranking, Kellogg is 12th (as it was last year) and MIT is ninth, up from 13th; but in the latest Economist ranking, Kellogg is second (having been unseated from its perch at No. 1 by Booth), and MIT is 16th, having dropped from 12th two years ago to 19th last year before rebounding somewhat on the latest list.

Below, to provide a better picture of a school’s strengths and weaknesses, we’ve also compiled the U.S. News ranking of programs by discipline. These numbers are nearly a year old and will be refreshed in March when U.S. News releases its new ranking. The final table on this page parses some more data from the U.S. News and Financial Times rankings: U.S. News‘ scores from corporate recruiters and academics and The Financial Times‘ alumni recommendation and academic research rankings, as well as FT‘s salary increase figures cited on page 1.