2025 Financial Times MBA Ranking: Harvard Plunges To Its Lowest Rank Ever

Financial Times 2025 MBA Ranking: The Top Five are Wharton, Columbia, IESE Business School, INSEAD, and SDA Bocconi

If you scratch your head when perusing the new 2025 MBA ranking from the Financial Times, you will hardly be alone. The well-watched annual list, published today (Feb. 17), is chock full of shocks and surprises. In fact, it’s hard to know where to begin in cataloging the head-spinning ups and downs of business schools this year.

First off, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the most highly selective prestige MBA program in the world, is nowhere to be found on the list. The Financial Times told Stanford in an email that it “did not receive enough responses/data from your alumni for your programme to be considered.” This is the exact same predicament that befell Wharton two years ago when that school’s MBA program disappeared from the ranking.

The newspaper requires a minimum response rate of 20% to its alumni survey, with at least 20 fully completed surveys. The failure of schools such as Stanford and Wharton to meet the cutoff suggests that graduates of these schools aren’t taking the Financial Times ranking very seriously. That is little surprise because last year, Stanford fell 19 places to rank 23rd, a new low for the school’s MBA program.

Harvard Business School’s MBA program, meantime, plunged to its lowest FT rank ever, 13th place, in a tie with Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. Harvard’s dismal placement numbers last year, when nearly a quarter of the graduating class of MBAs failed to have jobs three months after graduation, played a role in the decline. The last time Harvard topped the list was five years ago under Dean Nitin Nohria. No MBA program in the FT‘s Top 25 has fallen more than Harvard in the past five years.

The Financial Times’ Top Ten MBAs In 2025

2025 Rank & School	Y-O-Y Change	Alumni Salary	Post-MBA Salary Increase	Value For Money Rank
1. Pennsylvania (Wharton)	——–	$241,522	117%	92
2. Columbia	+1	$242,747	131%	75
3. IESE	+3	$198,584	139%	96
4. INSEAD	-2	$209,992	117%	30
4. SDA Bocconi	-1	$217,241	124%	15
6. MIT (Sloan)	——–	$232,565	132%	83
7. London Business School	+1	$214,823	111%	98
8. ESADE	+9	$205,044	173%	63
9. HEC Paris	+3	$191,828	136%	50
10. Northwestern (Kellogg)	-4	$219,487	118%	90

MANY RANKING WINNERS & LOSERS ON THIS YEAR’S FINANCIAL TIMES MBA RANKING

Chicago Booth fell out of the FT‘s Top Ten, declining to 17th from ranking 10th last year. Dartmouth’s Tuck School dropped eight places to rank 20th on the list. Yale School of Management fell even more, nine spots, to rank 24th, shockingly behind Nanyang Business School in Singapore. The University of Southern California’s Marshall School plunged 17 places to rank 50th. Only two years ago in 2022, the school’s MBA program ranked 21st on the FT list.

Less surprising this year is the strong finish by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which retained its first place finish from last year. This is the 13th time Wharton’s MBA program has won the FT‘s top honor, more than any other program by far. Since the FT began ranking MBA programs in 1999, Harvard is behind Wharton with seven first-place wins (see table below).

Rounding out the Top Ten is Columbia Business School in second place, followed by IESE Business School in Barcelona, while INSEAD and SDA Bocconi are both tied for fourth. MIT Sloan is in sixth place, with London Business School next, followed by No. 8 ESADE Business School in Barcelona as well, No. 9 HEC Paris, and No. 10 Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The upshot: For the first time ever, six of the Top Ten programs are based in Europe, up from four last year. Five years ago in 2020, only three European MBA programs made the FT‘s Top Ten: INSEAD, LBS, and HEC Paris.

BARCELONA’S ESADE BUSINESS SCHOOL GAINED THE MOST IN THE TOP TEN

The biggest Top Ten winner this year is ESADE, which jumped nine places to rank eighth from 17th last year. Other notable climbers include CEIBS in Shanghai, up nine spots, to rank 12th from 21st, and IMD in Switzerland, up 14 positions to rank 22nd from 36th in 2024.

The topsy-turvy results partially reflect last year’s challenging placement stats. Most schools worldwide experienced declines in starting compensation as well as placement due to layoffs in the tech sector and softer hiring among consulting firms. But they also are a reflection of the FT’s methodology and the reality that differences among many of these MBA programs are so few that inconsequential changes in the metrics used to rank school result in larger ranking differences than are actually justified.

Overall, 20 business schools saw double-digit advances or declines year-over-year, even though MBA programs rarely change dramatically on an annual basis. That means roughly 22% of the Top 100 programs that had been on last year’s list had numerical rankings that were ten or more places different than a year earlier. Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business is the greatest beneficiary of those changes, gaining 22 places to rank 78th best in the world from 100 last year. Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business in Canada along with USC Marshall declined the most: Each school losing 17 spots to rank 79th and 50th, respectively. More U.S. MBA programs took it on the chin. Five of the ten double-digit ranking losers are located in the U.S. this year, while only one of the ten gained major ground (see the biggest winners and losers on the following page).

A record six Indian Institutes of Management made the FT list this year, with two newcomers: IIM-Indore, which returned to the list at a rank of 69, after an absence last year, and IIM-Kozhikode, which ranked 86th. Kozhikode also is the highest new entry on the FT list. The highest rated was IIM Ahmedabad, ranked 31st, a ten-place improvement from 2024. Even so, the Indian School of Business retained its status as the best business school in India, with the highest ranking of any Indian school in 27th place. While Ahmedabad gained considerable ground this year, IIM-Bangalore lost 10 places to rank 56th.