2024 LinkedIn MBA Ranking: New Expanded Global Approach, Same Silly Mistakes

LinkedIn’s 2024 MBA ranking is its second look at programs. Unlike the first, this new ranking takes a global look at MBA programs and ranks 100 schools, double its debut ranking last year

On the surface, LinkedIn’s entry into the MBA rankings game makes great sense. The professional networking site has exclusive access to highly valuable data on the careers of professionals worldwide. Mining that treasure trove won’t tell you anything about the educational experience of students, the quality of incoming MBA candidates, the immediate salary and career outlooks of graduates, or the expertise of the faculty.

But with its one billion members worldwide, LinkedIn can track the career progress of MBA graduates over time and that can be one metric important to MBA applicants who are deciding whether to attend a school’s full-time MBA program. No less crucial, the top of this ranking looks pretty sensible. Stanford claims first place, displacing Harvard Business School which finished first in the debut ranking. INSEAD comes in second, just ahead of Harvard, Wharton, and MIT Sloan.

Still, the big looming question posed by LinkedIn’s second annual MBA ranking is how credible are these results?

Sadly, not very. For one thing, there are millions of young professionals, including those with MBA degrees, who prefer not to be so public with their professional lives. They aren’t on the LinkedIn platform. Many white-collar types, secure in their jobs, don’t even bother to keep their LinkedIn profiles up to date. Only 30% of U.S. adults use LinkedIn overall, with 53% of U.S. college graduates on the platform.

LINKEDIN’S MBA RANKING ATTEMPTS TO MEASURE THINGS OTHER THAN CAREER PROGRESS

Far more troubling, however, is LinkedIn’s methodology for cranking out this ranking. If the social media platform only tracked career progress, that would make for a better ranking solely based on longer-term career outcomes. LinkedIn, however, isn’t solely relying on this more credible data point. Instead, its editors have tossed in such things as “hiring and demand,” without using far more reliable school-specific placement data, and “gender parity.” measured not by school-specific admission and graduation stats but by who happened to put profiles up on LinkedIn.

Even worse, LinkedIn’s incredibly vague description of its methodology gives no clue as to how the editors weigh each of the five pillars they are using to rank schools. And there is no transparency on how each school ranks on each pillar nor what their actual score might be. Does LinkedIn put greater weight on “career advancement” and “leadership potential” where it has more credible data, or does it equally weigh these two pillars with its metrics on “networking,” “job placement”, and “gender parity”, data points for which LinkedIn has far less credibility? We don’t know because LinkedIn fails to disclose this basic information.

There is plenty of reason to be skeptical. LinkedIn does share the top five schools in each category. Guess who is in first place on job placement? Pace University’s Lubin School of Business (see below chart). This school doesn’t even bother to publish an MBA employment report. However, it does claim that 96% of its master’s degree graduates in 2023 were employed, continuing education, or doing some form of service. Unlike most business schools which regularly report the percentage of its MBA graduates with jobs at commencement and three months later, Pace calculates stats six months after graduation for 28 different master’s programs. By the way, most of the MBA students at Pace are in the school’s part-time, two-year program, meaning they are already fully employed. Yet, LinkedIn asserts that it excludes from its ranking analysis executive MBAs and part-time MBAs.

NO. 1 FOR NETWORKING? THE INDIAN INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN TRADE

LinkedIn’s number one school for networking? Would you believe it’s the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade. Huh? This is an MBA program that has never cracked any other of the major MBA rankings. What’s more, all five of the highest-ranked programs for networking are all in India (more on why this is so later). LinkedIn measures the strength of a school’s alumni network by connections: how connected alumni of the same program are to each other, the average connections alumni have with individuals in director-level positions or above; and the network growth rate of the recent cohort before and after graduation. What it can’t measure is whether an alum of the same school calls you back when you reach out and how helpful they actually are. Case in point: As the Editor-in-Chief of Poets&Quants I have more than 694,000 followers, but I know only a tiny fraction of them and would hardly consider that number a reflection on the quality of my network.

Equally mysterious is how Stanford can rate number one overall when Harvard ranks ahead on two pillars–career advancement and leadership potential–and Stanford fails to rank among the top five in the other three pillars. It is also puzzling how INSEAD can rank above Harvard when it ranks fifth in career advancement and fourth in leadership potential.

It is also worth noting how self-serving this ranking is. The job placement rank is based in part on a paid product on LinkedIn’s recruiter InMail outreach data from employers with job searches advertised on the platform. The networking rank rewards member activity on LinkedIn which has long been trying to increase its traffic on the site. After all, roughly a third of LinkedIn users visit the site every month and most of them are in job search mode.

Source: LinkedIn MBA Ranking

LINKEDIN’S MBA RANKING: FIVE OF THE TOP 30 MBA PROGRAMS ARE IN INDIA

This new ranking, unlike LinkedIn’s first last year, is global. The platform ranks 100 programs, double its debut list, from all over the world. And there are surprises galore in the results. INSEAD ranks higher than the Harvard Business School. The Indian School of Business, ranked sixth, is ahead of Columbia, Northwestern Kellogg, Chicago Booth, Yale, Dartmouth Tuck, Duke Fuqua and UVA Darden. Even more eyebrow-raising is the fact that five of the Top 30 MBA programs and six of the Top 50 on this list are in India, including the Indian Institutes of Management at Ahmedabad (19), Calcutta (24), Bangalore (27), Lucknow (29), and Indore (46).

What accounts for this success which runs counter to every other ranking, including the Financial Times? It’s simply who fills out profiles on LinkedIn’s platform. Indian professionals represent a significant and growing presence on LinkedIn and are the second largest source of LinkedIn traffic. LinkedIn even has features and products to appeal to the Indian market, the second largest in the world. Some 117 million professionals in India are on LinkedIn, far more than the 83 million members in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain–the primary business school markets in Europe. While the U.S. economy is nearly nine times as large as India, $24 trillion in gross domestic product vs. $2.8 trillion, LinkedIn’s U.S. members are only 1.8 times those in India. So India’s strong showing in this ranking is largely a function of who is filling out their LinkedIn profiles.

These are serious shortcomings that overshadow LinkedIn’s MBA ranking narrow focus on post-MBA advancement in senior-level roles. Unlike many other rankings that weigh a broad range of factors, such as academic reputation, student satisfaction, faculty quality, and one’s ability to land a job right after graduation, LinkedIn’s approach centers around the post-MBA career trajectories of graduates who are LinkedIn users. It’s an interesting data point, to be sure, but hardly a ranking of the best MBA programs.

DON’T MISS: LINKEDIN’s DEBUT MBA RANKING: SHREWS CONCEPT, BOTCHED EXECUTION