Stanford Repeats At No. 1 In Financial Times 2019 MBA Ranking

Wharton School of Business

WHARTON AND HARVARD TOP THE FT’S RESEARCH RANKING FOR FACULTY

Oftentimes, the more revealing and valuable insights from any business school ranking comes from the different components it attempts to measure. Consider the FT’s attempt, for example, to rate the academic research pumped out by a school’s faculty. The Financial Times calculates a research ranking for each school based on the number of articles published by current full-time faculty members in 50 selected journals that range from the more practitioner oriented Harvard Business Review to the more academic Administrative Science Journal. It measures faculty output between January of 2016 and August of 2018 and then ranks each school on the absolute number of publications with the number weighted relative to the size of a school faculty.

Again, the results here can vary significantly year-over-year because the period measured changes every year and some schools lose highly productive professors to rivals or retirement. This year, Harvard Business School zoomed up 15 places according to the Financial Times into a first-place tie with Wharton. Only a year ago, HBS was in 16th place on the research ranking. London Business School also jumped 17 spots to rank 10th from 27th, while Washington University’s Olin School of Business gained 15 places to rank 12th. Those three schools had the biggest improvements in the FT’s research ranking among the top 25 business schools.

Who stumbled the most? INSEAD and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business each tumbled 11 places to rank 20th and 24th, respectively. Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management’s research ranking plunged a dozen places to finish 16th from fourth a year earlier (see below).