How To Read & Interpret The Financial Times MBA Ranking

Rankings illustration from the new graphic novel on MBA admissions by Menlo Coaching

Lesson #4: The detail matters more than the headline

Another issue with the ranking is that comparing all schools together does not reflect the real choices that students make. “People are applying to our school because we’re in Germany,” adds Barniville. “So people really want to move into the market. What other people are earning in the U.S. is just not relevant to them.” He suggests that subdividing the rankings into your own competitive set could be a good way to start comparing schools. And then digging into the data to compare schools according to what matters to you – whether it’s how international your classmates will be or what kinds of companies hire a school’s MBA graduates, the former of which is captured by the FT ranking, while the latter requires a search through a school’s published employment report.

Other criteria which have relatively low weightings in the ranking might be extremely important to some students. For example, “value for money” could be a pertinent statistic. As could “career progress,’ which measures changes in the level of seniority and the size of the company that employs alums of a school. Yet both account for just 3% of the final ranking.

“Those could be very important indicators for students in terms of thinking, ‘What is it that I want to get out of my MBA?” asks Conrad Chua. head of MBA admissions and careers at the Cambridge Judge Business School. “Which are the schools that fit what I’m looking for?’ You need to really look at that column to see how those schools have been doing,”

Lesson #5: One Ranking Matters A Lot Less Than Several

It’s important to remember that the Financial Times is merely one of the five most influential MBA rankings in the world. There’s also Bloomberg Businessweek, which debuted 13 years before the FT ranking; U.S. News & World Report, the U.S.-centric and data-rich ranking that some academics have called the most reliable MBA ranking; Forbes, the biennial list which measures programs purely on a return-on-investment basis; and finally The Economist, the FT‘s rival in Europe.

Anyone who has ever dabbled in statistics knows that datasets routinely produce anomalies. That is certainly true of every MBA ranking. That’s why it is much better not to count on any single ranking but rather to see how a school performs across a set of different criteria, however flawed each system may be. That is also why Poets&Quants‘ annual MBA rankings–produced for both the top 100 U.S. MBA programs and the top 76 international school MBA options–are so closely relied upon.

In one glimpse, readers can see where each school falls across the very latest and most important rankings, plus how all those rankings sum together in a way that accounts for each ranking’s credibility. Combining the five most influential lists in a composite ranking, moreover, tends to diminish the oddball results that can occur in any one ranking. And it has one other important benefit: An MBA program ranked on multiple lists has far more credibility than a school ranked on only one or two lists. That’s also important because some schools shop for the best ranking, refusing to participate with lists where their programs may not do all that well.

Lesson #6: For some, a crude reading could be best

The FT ranking list is so widely followed that, in a very important respect, it does not just reflect perception, but helps to shapes it. The ranking list “creates brand value,” says Pascal Michels, director of MBA admissions at Barcelona’s IESE. “If you take any leading school’s brochure, and you did a blind test by erasing any branding elements, it might be quite challenging to tell schools apart. Rankings provide an element of differentiation.”

To one subset of students, brand matters above all else and they follow a “top school strategy” when looking for a business school. They don’t care why a school is ranked highly, they just want to go to it so they can leverage a school’s brand on a CV. That could make sense for students who want an MBA to open doors, or who are interested in burnishing their own personal brand as much as possible. Truth is, the research does show that graduates of the bigger brand schools make substantially more over their professional careers than MBAs from very good programs (see The Most Lucrative Seven-Figure MBAs).

And why not? If the rankings are so complex that MBA applicants can’t fully understand them, do employers? It might be true that the education at the 100th ranked school is as good or better than one ranked 45th, but would you rather employ someone with a Harvard Business School MBA or one from Nowheresville? It might not be fair, but there is a strong argument that the simplest interpretation of the rankings is the best.

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