7) Insurgents At The Gate: Three Schools Poised To Make A Run

The M7 is a pretty steady gig. Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg, MIT Sloan, Columbia – they’ve been lumped together as the American elite, sharing each other’s prestige and achievements. Call it Branding 101: once you’re positioned among a select group, it is difficult to be displaced – even among rankings aficionados.

Past the M7, you’ll find Dartmouth Tuck and UC Berkeley Haas, academic powerhouses and culture-driven programs that can never squeeze into the M7’s space. The final spot in the Top 10? Generally, it rotates among the likes of Michigan Ross and UVA Darden.

Comforting consistency and predictability to some – depressingly daunting and self-fulfilling to others.

That is…until the 2024-2025 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking hit the net – and a pattern emerged just below the Top 10. Call them the Terrifying Troika: Cornell Johnson, Duke Fuqua, and Yale SOM – all programs with big names, distinctive identities and formidable resources. Even more, each is carrying momentum into 2025.

Let’s start with Cornell Johnson, which has yo-yoed up-and-down Bloomberg Businessweek over the past five years. It returned to the 11th spot in 2025 – no different than 2022 and 2019.  One reason: Johnson excelled in the dimension that mattered most to Bloomberg Businessweek: Compensation. Worth a 37.7% share of the weight, Johnson ranked 8th overall – a far better showing for Johnson than The Financial Times, where the program finished 15th among American schools (a measure covering alumni pay within three years of graduation). By excelling in Compensation, Johnson offset a 32nd-place finish for Learning in Bloomberg Businessweek – a dimension worth a 25.5% weight. However, the Learning ranking may be a misnomer. In a similar survey conducted by The Princeton Review in 2024, Cornell earned the 2nd-highest marks from current students surveyed in this area – not to mention the best scores overall for its administration and family-friendliness. While Johnson finished 21st for its Network, the school ranked 3rd in a similar student and alumni poll conducted by The Financial Times in 2023.

In other words, Cornell Johnson shows the capacity to make a big improvement in two dimensions – Learning and Networking – that carry a 44.1% combined weight with Bloomberg Businessweek.

Duke Fuqua and Yale SOM tied for the 12th spot – moving up two and three spots respectively. For Fuqua, 12th is the highest ranking it has held over the past six years (though it did place 1st in the 2014 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking). In contrast, 2025 is a bounce-back year for Yale SOM, which fell from 10th to 15th between 2022-2023. Both follow a similar path as Cornell Johnson. They placed highly in Compensation (11th for Duke and 10th for Yale), lower in Learning (29th for Duke and 22nd for Yale), and mixed in Network (11th for Duke and 22nd for Yale). However, their differentiators are momentum. Both have shown marked improvements in recent years in MBA rankings. Among American programs in The Financial Times, both rank among the ten-best, each rising several spots over the past year. In the American-centric U.S. News ranking, Yale SOM has remained a Top 10 stalwart for the past five years, while Duke Fuqua has bee-bopped between 11th and 12th during the same period. In the CEOWorld ranking, Yale SOM finished 9th globally, while Duke Fuqua reached 8th in America with Fortune. Among American programs, Duke Fuqua and Yale SOM ranked 10th and 11th with LinkedIn.

In some respects, you could say that Cornell Johnson, Duke Fuqua, and Yale SOM are already Top 10 programs according to alternative rankings to Bloomberg Businessweek. In Ancient Rome, you may have described them as the ‘Barbarians at the Gate” – a presence outside the city walls that reflected that the incumbents no longer dictated all the rules within their sphere. In this case, the schools are better described as insurgents – schools who’ve invested heavily in building cultures, serving students, and satisfying employers. In the process, they have inserted themselves in the Top 10 conversation.

That said, the real work is ahead. After all, Columbia Business School – ranked as the #1 school in the world by The Financial Times just a year ago – will certainly bounce back from a 12-spot drop in the 2024-2025 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking. The same is true for 14th-ranked UC Berkeley Haas, which climbed back to 10th after the last time it finished 14th in 2022. There is always NYU Stern, which has traditionally pinballed between 11th and 13th in recent years with Bloomberg Businessweek. Let’s not forget Georgia Tech Scheller and Vanderbilt Owen, schools that made impressive strides in 2024-2025 and are now pressing to make the next step. The Terrifying Troika may be on the cusp of redefining the status quo, but there are plenty of program nipping at their heels.

It’s competition. It’s disruption. Capitalism at its finest. Business schools champion it. They teach it. Sure enough, they too live it.

8) International Schools: The Message Is Loud and Clear   

The U.S. News & World Report MBA Ranking absorbs lots of criticism. Too many ties. Too much weight on second-hand academic sentiment. Too much emphasis on inputs that reduce school mobility. However, it is the “U.S.” part of the ranking that hinders it the most. It doesn’t include international MBA programs – as if Americans won’t cross the oceans to learn leadership at London Business School or Asian business practices at CEIBS.

U.S. News’ message to the rest of the world: You don’t matter.

Alas, U.S. News is becoming a vestige of America-centric thinking. This fall, LinkedIn included international programs in their second-annual MBA ranking. The result: 7 international programs cracked the Top 20, with 24 represented among the Top 50. In fact, INSEAD ranked as the 2nd-best program in the world according to LinkedIn’s methodology. CEOWorld also takes a global view – and ranked the London Business School as the top business school in the world earlier this year. Of course, there is always The Financial Times, which has consistently allowed North American, European, Asian, and Latin American programs to go head-to-head. This year, 3 of the 5 highest-ranked programs in the FT – INSEAD, SDA Bocconi, and IESE Business School – hail from Europe. Overall, just 43 American programs grace The Financial Times’ Top 100.

Aside from Fortune and U.S. News, that leaves Bloomberg Businessweek clinging to an America First approach. Of course, Bloomberg Businessweek attempts to have it both ways. They rank international programs – but separate from American ones. In fact, Bloomberg Businessweek produces separate rankings for Europe, Asia, and Canada altogether.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s message to the rest of the world: You can’t compete.

Unless you are in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, whose schools are conspicuously absent. Then, Bloomberg Businessweek’s message is the same as U.S. News: You don’t matter.

More damning, Bloomberg Businessweek saddles American programs with a Diversity weight of 6.6%, divided equally between gender and minority populations. Hence, American schools are evaluated differently from their international counterparts. In other words, readers cannot make apples-to-apples comparisons on index scores when Networking, for example, is worth 18.6% in the United States and 23.8% elsewhere. Using this example, by Bloomberg Businessweek’s logic, it is apparently easier to find opportunities in the United States. Hence, classmate and alumni connections are less valuable there!

Back to Diversity, Bloomberg Businessweek rewards some schools and penalizes others in this dimension. Take Toronto Rotman, which boasted 49% women in the Class of 2025. While Rotman wasn’t included in the Bloomberg Businessweek Canadian ranking – despite ranking as the 2nd-best Canadian MBA program by The Financial Times – it wouldn’t receive any extra rankings push for achieving near gender parity. In contrast, IIM Bangalore, where women made up a 12% share of the last EPGP class, would not be penalized for a smaller percentage as would an American program.

While the United States is considered the melting pot, why should it be held to a higher standard on enrolling minorities? In the United Kingdom, for example, wouldn’t it be equally logical for business schools to be rewarded for enrolling a higher percentage of the country’s GMAT-taking population who may be Black, Asian, Indian, or Middle Eastern? Last year, 85% of IESE Business School’s incoming class hailed from outside Spain. Shouldn’t the methodology reward European schools – with many top programs traditionally enrolling 80% or more of their student population from outside their home country – for sponsoring such diverse classes?

In other words, should Bloomberg Businessweek apply a more rigid standard internationally that only accounts for the underrepresented members in a school’s home country – or should international recruiting earn some extra goodwill? Such questions reflect a caste system between American and international programs that simply cannot be bridged. As a result, it produces a wedge that hampers readers in their early research on programs.

Make no mistake: Bloomberg Businessweek’s international rankings require some rethinking. After all, it views the United States as the outlier and proceeds to lump the rest of the world together under the same methodology, Translation: Bloomberg Businessweek approaches Europe, Asia, and Canada as if there are no distinct variations in measures like average pay and cost of living or percentage of international (with Indian classes composed mostly of students from the home country). To go further, there are notable omissions in this year’s ranking. IIM Ahmedabad is considered best-in-class for graduate business education in India. However, the school doesn’t even appear in the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking. It also doesn’t include Top 50 FT programs like the National University of Singapore, Fudan University, Nanyang University, and Hong Kong University. That begs the question: How much effort did Bloomberg Businessweek really put into the Asia ranking?

Fair, transparent, and comprehensive. That’s all you can expect from a business school ranking. It’s a starting point after all. Bloomberg Businessweek’s inability to fully disclose underlying questions and data has already called its transparency into question. The non-American rankings do the same for its fairness and comprehensiveness.