Fortune: The Best MBA Alumni Networks

“Your network is your net worth.”

You’re bound to hear this maxim in business school. It sums up the promise of an MBA. When you make a call, someone returns it. When you need a favor, a door opens. Your network is your ticket into a tight and exclusive circle – opportunity, influence, security. Authority by association.

The question is, how do you measure the value of a business school’s alumni network?

This week, Fortune published a misguided attempt to tackle this very question. To do this, Fortune leaned on two variables: size and stature. With size, Fortune based 60% of its weight on school size. More specifically, it gave equal 20% weights to class sizes for the classes of 2021, 2022, and 2023. The remaining 40% was devoted to a Fortune 1000 score – “The number of alumni who are now C-suite executives at Fortune 1000 companies.”

Size, of course, does not measure the quality of an alumni network. In fact, the inverse is more likely to be true. It is easier to remain anonymous in an MBA factory and more difficult to deeply engage with your classmates in ways that bring value to an alumni network.  Measuring alumni success by the number of a school’s alumni who have C-suite jobs in the Fortune 1000 is a 1950s way of looking at success and also has no relevance to the value of an alumni network. After all, today the most highly desired MBA jobs are not at Fortune 1000 companies; they are at startups, early-stage companies, private equity and venture capital firms, consulting outfits, hedge funds, and non-profits, all of which are excluded from the Fortune list which simply ranks mostly public companies by revenue.

HOW HARVARD TEACHES LEADERSHIP

So according to Fortune, the winner of its alumni network ranking is none other than Harvard Business School. After all, HBS boasted the largest incoming full-time MBA class last fall with 938 students. At the same time, Fortune found 94 Harvard MBAs among the elite leaders in its listing of the top 1000 companies – more than any other full-time MBA program. Overall, HBS boasts nearly 91,000 alumni across 173 countries, ensuring students and graduates can tap into most companies, industries, roles, and regions. Even more, their alumni roll reads like a who’s who of American business: Jamie Dimon, Stephen Schwarzman, Michael Bloomberg, Sal Khan, Bill Ackman, and Sheryl Sandberg.

In terms of leadership, Harvard Business School has been described as the “West Point of Capitalism.” One reason is the case method, with Harvard MBAs stepping into a CEO’s shoes to dissect over 500 cases. Call it the development of leadership muscle memory, with students engaging in synthesizing and interpreting information before formulating solutions, weighing alternatives, communicating findings, and defending (and modifying) positions. It is a process that teaches leadership is listening and communication is collaboration. In the process, students receive an unforgettable daily reminder that there is always someone in the room who has more experience, creativity, or eloquence.

Even more, it mimics exactly what MBAs will face in c-suite roles, adds Daniel Park. “It’s a cliché, but “there is a saying in the military that the plan never survives first contact with the enemy,” explains ’23 grad Daniel Park. “Decisions are made with imperfect information in a complex environment. The case method, in my opinion, is the closest one can get to simulating this decision-making process without real-world repercussions. This type of training exercise is critical to enable students to find their management styles and hone their decision-making skills, under pressure and multiple sets of circumstances.”

HBS alumni success is further rooted in the culture expects from students – and what students expect from themselves. “At HBS, the expectation is clear: become a leader who makes an impact in the world,” explains Juan Sepulveda, now a second-year at the school. “The entire experience, along with strong support systems, is carefully structured to ensure that every student has the resources and encouragement necessary to reach their highest potential. This creates an environment where every pursuit is geared towards attaining the summit of excellence.”

“CALL ME WHEN YOU NEED A MOUNTAIN MOVED”

True to Fortune’s bias towards scale, the Wharton School ranked as the #2 MBA alumni network. The school finished just below HBS with 874 incoming students for incoming students. At the same time, Wharton’s alumni footprint swells past 100,000 graduates when undergraduates are factored into the mix. However, it isn’t just size that makes the Wharton School’s alumni network so formidable. Kendall Rankin, a 2024 graduate, points to an event hosted by the AAMBAA (African American MBA Association). Here, Rankin was exposed to Dr. Pamela Jolly, a 2000 MBA grad who left a deep impression – and set a high bar.

“The last thing she told us was, “Call me when you need a mountain moved, and I can do that.” That statement was so powerful to me because it speaks to the accessibility of Wharton alumni, who are all influential and impactful in their own right. It made me feel like I’m part of a network that will always go the extra mile for each other.”

Alas, class size becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in Fortune’s Alumni Network Ranking. The University of Chicago’s Booth School, which attracted the 4th-largest class size last fall, placed 3rd behind Harvard and Wharton. No doubt, this ranking was hastened by the 73 alumni occupying high-level c-suite positions in the Fortune 1000 – a number second only to Harvard Business School. Technically, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School tied Booth with 73 graduates in top positions among elite firms. However, Kellogg finished 5th, a spot below Columbia Business School, due to the latter having a larger student intake (900 vs. 523 students) last fall. That said, Kellogg still produced 34 more C-suite executives than CBS according to Fortune data.    

TUCK UPENDS THE FORTUNE MODEL

For the most part, of course, class size has nothing to do with the quality of an alumni network. It only means a school has more alumni.  A different approach to measuring the true value of an alumni network is taken by The Financial Times. In this survey, the FT queried graduates on the “effectiveness of the alumni network for career opportunities, starting companies, gaining new ideas, recruiting staff, and providing event information (e.g. career-related talks).” There are striking differences when their rankings are compared side by side.

Qualitatively, Stanford GSB earned the FT’s highest average marks over the quality of its alumni network. That was a noticeable difference from Fortune, where the GSB finished 6th, courtesy of ranking 6th in class size and 12th for Fortune 1000 presence. Dartmouth College’s Tuck School produced the 2nd-highest average score from FT survey respondents – a far cry from its 17th-place finish with Fortune.  Similarly, Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School ranked 3rd with The Financial Times and 18th with Fortune. Conversely, Fortune’s Top 4 – Harvard, Wharton, Booth, and Columbia – ranked 13th, 25th, 14th, and 17th respectively among their alumni surveyed by The Financial Times.

In other words, Fortune measures alumni capacity, not merely size. Case in point: The Tuck School, which graduates less than 300 MBAs a year but was ranked 17th by this silly ranking. Yet, arguably, the Tuck alumni network has often come out on top of other surveys, including those done by Bloomberg Businessweek. With a graduating class that is less than a third of the size of Harvard’s, Tuck only has 13 alumni in the C-suite of Fortune‘s 1000 (not that this antiquated measure of success is even relevant today.

Another way to measure the enthusiasm of alumni is the percentage of them who reach into their pockets and support their alma mater. In Tuck’s case, 75% of the school’s 10,700 alumni contributed to their latest fund-raising campaign. That’s more than double the going rate, with Tuck alumni pushing the school over its $250-million-dollar goal in record time. There are few universities in the world and no business school that reaches this level of alumni giving.

Tuck’s secret is its residential experience in rural Hanover, New Hampshire. The school caters exclusively to full-time MBAs. For the most part, they live together in campus dorms, which means they can’t hop a train back to their tony neighborhoods after class. Even more, everyone is expected to get involved and contribute at Tuck, be it planning a conference or joining classmates for weekend skiing. In a 2024 interview with P&Q, Dean Matthew Slaughter jokes that “no one ends up in Hanover by accident.” Instead, they commit themselves to the experience – going ‘all in’ because they want something more than just a jobs network.

“With roughly 285 MBA candidates in each class, Tuck students can get to know their classmates in ways that are not possible at larger programs,” Dean Slaughter adds. “This allows students to co-create a community that fosters inclusion and growth in an encouraging environment. They quickly grasp the value of diverse perspectives and the benefit of considering multiple stakeholders. They learn how to constructively disagree and create trust-based, no-fear-of-conflict teams that navigate difficult conversations and decisions with empathy and respect.”

MISSING PIECES IN FORTUNE’S RANKING

The Tuck model reflects the short-sightedness of the Fortune methodology for alumni networks. After all, networks aren’t just graduates who can help their successors land their first jobs. Instead, the most valuable networks are the classmates who share the stage on graduation day – not to mention the second-years who preceded them and the first-years who followed them. Those relationships can’t be measured in numbers, but rather the depth of connection that plays out over time. Even more, Fortune’s alumni network doesn’t factor in highly connected faculty members, coaches, and in-residence executives who are rarely shy about opening up their own networks to promising students.

Those aren’t the only areas where Fortune’s methodology is suspect. It also neglects non-American programs. In The Financial Times alumni network survey, for example, three of the five highest-rated alumni networks are based in schools outside the United States: INSEAD, SDA Bocconi, and IESE Business School. By granting 40% weight to c-suite executives, Fortune assumes that Tim Cook and Mary Barra have 30 minutes to chat up first-years about their career trajectories. Rather than focusing on the high-end, Fortune would be better served looking into the concentration of MBAs in leading companies. This is particularly true of recent grads, who are closer to the experience and more apt to pick up a phone, return an email, or grab a coffee.

Finally, Fortune overlooks a segment whose impact could overshadow the MBA network: Non-MBAs. Most alumni don’t just view the business school as their alma mater. They also picture themselves as part of the larger university community. At the micro level, that could include Executive MBAs, Online MBAs, and Undergraduate Business Majors. In fact, an alumni network could extend to graduates who never set foot in the business school: engineers, lawyers, computer scientists, researchers, educators – you name it. They lived in the same areas, enjoyed the same traditions, and connected with the same people. In many cases, they won’t think twice about doing a solid for someone from their alma mater. After all, they are connected in so many ways beyond a field of discipline. That is particularly true at mission-driven institutions like Notre Dame.

“One of the things that leads to the strength of the network is really our mission,” explains John Rooney, director of graduate business career services, in an interview with Poets&Quants. “They feel like they’re joining a community and something that’s bigger than themselves. So that leads to viewing yourself as part of a group versus an individual getting an MBA. I think there’s a bigger message and a sense of community around the mission that pulls everybody together and makes the whole networking piece really integrated into everything we do and that strengthens every interaction in that regard.”

To see Fortune’s Top 25 Alumni Network, including data on class sizes and c-suite representation and a comparison against The Financial Times alumni ranking, go to the next page.