Ten Biggest Surprises In The Financial Times 2020 MBA Ranking

Darden students gather after class

Is UVA Darden Today’s IT School In The U.S.?

If you have to identify the one business school that made the most consequential rankings gains in the past decade, it would undeniably by the Yale School of Management. So what’s the hot U.S. school right now? The Financial Times ranking is just one of several that point to the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

For years, the school has been known for having the best MBA teaching faculty in the world. Like Harvard Business School, it’s largely a case study school with a far more intimate and collaborative student culture than HBS. The Economist has rated Darden’s MBA program the No. 1 education experience in the world for the eighth consecutive years until 2019 when it came in second. And the school has one of the most visionary leaders in Dean Scott Beardsley, a former senior partner of McKinsey & Co. He has been known to take a real interest in students, even calling up admits to close the deal.

In this year’s Financial Times ranking, Darden advanced another five places to rank 18th, its highest FT rank, moving the school into the Top 20 in the world. No less important, however, this latest improvement comes on top of a nine-place gain the previous year. Just three years ago, Darden finished in 35th place in 2017. Darden’s position–which now puts the school 12th best in the U.S.–was partly enhanced by the addition of last years’ new FT metric on corporate social responsibility in the ranking. Darden came out first last year and second in 2020 behind only IESE Business School for having a substantial amount of teaching on the subject in its core curriculum.

But the school isn’t only doing well on the Financial Times ranking. Just two months ago, Darden jumped four spots in the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking to claim fifth place, its best Businessweek standing ever. And that increase came after the school soared eight places upward a year earlier in the same ranking.

Darden is a school with momentum.

IE Business School in Madrid

IE Business School in Madrid

What In The World Happened To IE Business School?

One of Europe’s most successful institutions, the highly innovative IE Business School in Madrid, plunged 21 places to its lowest Financial Times ranking ever, finishing 52nd from 31st a year earlier. That performance has to qualify as the single biggest shock on this year’s ranking list. Even more curiously, you won’t find a word about the decline in any of the editorial coverage by the Financial Times.

That was also true in 2018 when the FT tossed the school off its ranking after editors said they had discovered “irregularities” in returned alumni surveys from IE. The lack of coverage by the FT was a shock itself because a year earlier in 2017 IE had finished eighth-best in the world and third-best in Europe. Now the Financial Times ranks 12 other European programs, including Spanish rivals IESE and ESADE as well as Warwick Business School and Cass Business School at City, University of London, higher than IE. The rankings plunge, moreover, occurs in a big year for IE when it will open a brand new campus in an office tower in Madrid.

So what in the world happened? IE’s fall reflects declines in a number of key FT data points. In fact, the school fell in eight of the 20 different metrics the newspaper uses to rank MBA programs since 2017. More importantly, those eight declining metrics account for 65% of the weight of the overall MBA ranking. Average alumni salaries fell to $135,422, from $153,547 last year and $168,923 in 2017. That’s a 19.8% drop in two years that forced down the pay boost of an IE MBA to 83% of pre-school salaries, down from 100% last year and 108% in 2017. The rank given to ‘career progress’ slipped to 33 from four in 2017, while the MBA program’s ‘value for money’ fell to 59th from 24th three years ago.