Ten biggest surprises in the 2025 Financial Times MBA ranking

Another Financial Times MBA ranking. Another outpouring of outrage.

This time, the controversy may well be bigger than ever. After all, Stanford Graduate School of Business isn’t even on the list. It failed to meet the newspaper’s minimum response rate to the FT‘s alumni surveys. Harvard Business School is ranked 13th in a tie with Cornell Johnson, even though it bested No. 1 Wharton on the majority of the FT‘s ranking metrics. A record six European MBA programs are in the Top Ten, eclipsing such big global branded business schools as Northwestern Kellogg, Chicago Booth, Dartmouth Tuck, Berkeley Haas, and Virginia Darden.

Even the Financial Time’s own paying subscribers went berserk, calling the ranking absolute nonsense, among other more pejorative criticisms. The long-standing love/hate relationship schools have with rankings in general are tilting far more to the hate side with the 2025 Financial Times MBA ranking.

So what are the biggest shocks on the new list? After analyzing the results and parsing the 21 different elements that go into this ranking, we identify the ten most compelling surprises. Some obvious; others not so.

1) What The FT’s Own Subscribers Think Of The Ranking

Totally Loopy.

Pathetic.

Obviously suspect.

A joke.

Simply not credible.

Nonsensical.

Meaningless.

Whoever produced it should resign from embarrassment.

Ouch. This is how the Financial Times’ own subscribers—the readers who pay to access FT content—are reacting to the newspaper’s 2025 global MBA ranking.

The criticism is withering.

All rankings, of course, are controversial, and all of them produce counter-intuitive results that are often beyond belief.

But this year, given the absence of Stanford and the 13th place finish by Harvard Business School, the condemnation is especially harsh. Readers are not only finding fault with the results; they are rightly questioning the newspaper’s methodology for determining the ranks of MBA programs.

“Some of the criterion used are just plain stupid,” complains one reader. “How does an MBA being “international” really help with the quality of teaching? Countries the size of the USA, China and India can have far more diversity internally while still counted as one country for the purpose of a ranking. In addition, how does diversity based on race, gender and sexual orientation really help an MBA programme? I can very well understand the diversity based on different professions and fields but not the demographic factors. And then you have ESG and carbon footprint! Are you evaluating MBA programmes or NGOs?”

Adds another critic. “Guys, for decades this has been suspect. You’ve introduced criteria that is suspect and not verifiable. Kids vote for their colleges😱, U.S. kids don’t care about this ranking so probably don’t bother voting! It’s not a responsible thing to publish anymore. Some (soon to be) poor students will make horrendous choices based on this.”

While these are legitimate critiques, they also fails to give the FT its due for publishing an inevitably controversial list with high integrity based on real data. The transparency the FT brings to the project is also admirable–along with the availability of that data over every year of the ranking since it was launched in 1999.

In comparison, U.S. News makes readers pay to see the data behind its annual ranking and hides all previous lists even for paying subscribers. The FT, moreover, conducts occasional audits of the data supplied by the schools. U.S. News does not.

Business school deans generally love to hate rankings, unless they perform above expectations. But at the end of the day, the FT ranking puts a tremendous amount of intelligence into the marketplace, helping prospective students make more informed decisions about where to study. For applicants, it is a valuable data point but clearly not a reason to go to one particular MBA program over another.

2) The Weird Math In The Financial Times’ Ranking

Ask any MBA admissions consultant about the Financial Times newest ranking and you will get an ear full. Among the things, you will hear is that the MBA programs ranked fourth and eighth rarely come up in their discussions with prospective students.

Virtually no one, they maintain, would choose No. 4 SDA Bocconi or No. 8 ESADE Business School over the likes of INSEAD or London Business School or, for that matter, IESE Business School or HEC Paris, all European programs that now rank in the Top Ten in the world, according to the FT.

After all, Bocconi’s MBA program was ranked 29th only five years ago in 2020, while ESADE was placed 24th. So what’s behind the massive increase in these two schools? Put simply, it’s compensation—the most heavily weighted components in the FT’s ranking methodology. Average weighted salary of alumni and the increase in salary from pre-MBA pay together account for 32% of the entire FT ranking.

The reported salaries by alumni at both Bocconi and ESADE have outpaced all other top European schools, often by wide margins. This is so even when LinkedIn, measuring the career progress of MBA alums on its platform, shows that MBAs with INSEAD or London Business School are their CVs are the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked programs in Europe. Bocconi, on the other hand, is ranked 19th by LinkedIn, behind Cranfield School of Management, IE Business School, and Imperial College Business School in London, among others.

In 2020, for example, the weighted salary of a Bocconi MBA alum, three years out, was $140,404. The most current number in this new ranking is $217,241, a massive jump of $76,837 or 54.7% over the 2020 figures.

That is an increase that makes Bocconi a clear outlier among the top European schools. During the same timeframe, INSEAD MBAs managed only a 15.8% increase, or $28,715 in total. Put another way, that means Bocconi alumni increased their salaries at a rate that was three and one-half times that of INSEAD alums. They also performed this feat against grads of London Business School, exceeding that school’s five-year rise by more than double the 25.3% gain among LBS MBAs (see table below).

And when it comes to the actual increase in post-MBA alumni pay vs. pre-MBA pay, Bocconi also outperforms based on the FT data. At Bocconi, that increase was 124%, nicely above the 117% rise for INSEAD or the 111% for LBS grads and considerable above the 88% increase reported by Cambridge Judge MBAs or the 106% rise reported by Oxford Said grads.

ESADE has also worked magic when it comes to these two key metrics in the FT’s ranking. In fact, its alums have performed even better than Bocconi’s. The weighted salaries for its MBA alumni are up by 117% in the past five years, $205,044 in this year’s report vs. $140,686 in 2020. That is more than double the outsized increase posted by Bocconi.

No less impressive, ESADE has equally bewildering numbers when it comes to pre-MBA vs. post-MBA salary increase. According to the FT, alums scored a 173% increase over pre-MBA pay, considerably better than Bocconi’s already impressive 135% jump (see table below).

The question to ask is obvious: How are Bocconi and ESADE MBAs outperforming INSEAD, London Business School, and other top European grads?