Ten Biggest Surprises In The Economist’s 2019 MBA Ranking

MBA students at Georgetown’s McDonough School

8) The Most Undervalued MBA Programs By The Economist

How does this latest ranking from The Economist match up against other rankings? We compared the results of the top 25 U.S. programs in Poets&Quants’ composite ranking with the latest list from The Economist to find out. The annual P&Q ranking, of course, reflects the five most influential rankings of MBA programs by U.S. News, the Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, and, of course, The Economist.

The most underappreciated program? Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Georgetown placed 45th in the world by The Economist. In P&Q’s latest ranking, Georgetown is ranked 23rd best in the U.S. That’s a difference of 22 places.

But several other highly prominent schools also tend to get less love from The Economist: UNC’s Kenan-Flager Business School, Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, MIT Sloan, and Rice University’s Jones School of Business (see below).

University of Florida’s Hough Hall

9) The Most Overvalued MBA Programs By The Economist

Not all schools fare poorly in The Economist‘s ranking. There are just as many other schools that appear favored by the list. The most overvalued programs among the top 25 in the U.S.?

It’s the University of Florida which is ranked 3oth best in the world by The Economist, versus P&Q’s rank of 47th in the U.S. alone. That is a difference of 17 places. The University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business gets a rankings’ kiss of 33 from The Economist vs. a P&Q ranking of 42, a ten-place difference (see below).