Australian B-School Secures Number 1 Spot In Better World MBA Ranking

Corporate Knights, a sustainable business magazine publication, has released its 2020 Better World MBA rankings.

Australia’s Griffith Business School ranked as the top b-school this year, improving from its 5th place ranking last year. UK-based Warwick Business School and the University of Bath School of Management placed 2nd and 3rd, respectively. A total of 40 b-schools were included in this year’s ranking.

B-SCHOOLS IMPROVE THEIR FOCUS ON SUSTAINABILITY

Corporate Knights bases its ranking methodology on publicly-disclosed information from business school websites. Schools are evaluated on five performance indicators (with weighting in brackets). They include: core course integration of sustainability (30%), faculty research publications on sustainability topics per faculty in calendar year 2019 (30%), number of citations per faculty for those publications (20%), sustainability-focused research institutes and centers (10%), faculty gender diversity (5%) and faculty racial diversity (5%).

Sustainability, from core courses to research topics, is the focus. And this year, Griffith Business School secured the top spot by scoring high on every key measure, particularly coursework,, research, and diversity.

“We have made a conscious decision that we believe every MBA should be a sustainable MBA,” Stephanie Schleimer, Griffith’s MBA director, tells Corporate Knights.

At Griffith, the MBA curriculum embraces sustainability as a topic of focus – a big reason why the b-school secured this year’s number one spot in the ranking.

“We don’t call our courses fancy names, either, because we believe a course in strategy should be all about responsible strategy and it should be all about total shared values,” Schleimer tells Corporate Knights. “We teach all these different things that we believe should just be the standard.”

Other schools also performed well in this year’s ranking by enriching course content, research, and hiring practices to fit the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

Duquesne University’s Palumbo-Donahue School of Business placed 4th this year, a big jump from its 28th position in 2019. The improvement was largely due to the school’s efforts in adding sustainability to more core courses and growing faculty publications and citations.

“I really see a deepening of the focus, and every year we are looking to make improvements to adjust the content to make it better and keep it fresh,” Karen Russo Donovan, the school’s associate dean of graduate programs and executive education, tells Corporate Knights.

Check out the full results for Corporate Knight’s 2020 Better World MBA rankings below.

Sources: Corporate Knights, Corporate Knights, United Nations