5) The Fall Of The House Of Booth

In corporate life, they’re called autopsies. After a setback, a team comes together to determine what went wrong. They look at the decisions made – and the chain reactions that followed. They evaluate the expectations, strategies, and execution. During the process, uncomfortable truths are shared and underlying tensions are revealed. At best, teams pinpoint where to improve. At worst, distrust and disillusionment take hold.

Based on recent rankings, the Booth School’s leadership team may want to hold an autopsy themselves. In every major ranking, the school is losing ground. It slipped from 3rd to 4th in U.S. News. In Bloomberg Businessweek, it fell from 2nd to 7th. LinkedIn pegged it at 8th – 8th – for a second year. QS doesn’t even rank Booth among the Top 10 – and the same goes for the c-suite executives who vote in the CEOWorld MBA Ranking.

SHOULD WE EVEN TRUST RANKINGS?

Rankings don’t matter, you’ll hear. Every methodology carries an agenda, others say – a pre-determined outcome akin to a pro wrestling match. Of course, there is the critique that rankings reward the wrong things and force schools to build profiles and invest in areas rewarded by rankings.

Thing is, each of these positions are defensible. Different rankings reflect different values. They are notoriously poor at measuring student growth, let alone the influence of a school’s degree on future success. At the same time, however, they enforce transparency and accountability. Fair or not, they create narratives.

In the case of the Booth School, it is that the program is no longer the begrudged equal of Stanford, Harvard, and Wharton. In fact, rankings point to Booth not even being the best business school in the Midwest.

A SLOW DECLINE

That perception is reinforced by the 2026 Financial Times MBA Ranking. Five years ago, Booth ranked as the #3 business school in the world according to The FT. Back then, their graduates earned more than any of their counterparts. Their career services center earned the 3rd-highest score from alumni surveyed. And Booth posted the 4th-highest score when their alumni were asked whether they would recommend the program. Most telling, on a 10-point scale, alumni gave Booth a 9.53 Satisfaction score in 2021, 7th-best in the world.

A year later, Booth sagged to 7th overall with the Satisfaction score dipping to 9.31. The Alumni Recommendation rank also slipped from 4th to 9th, while Career Services slid from 3rd to 10th. These weren’t input or output data. These numbers came straight from the people who knew the school best. By 2023, Booth had tumbled out of The FT’s Top 10 to 11th. The school made a small comeback in 2024, including a 9.56 Satisfaction score from alumni.

Sure, Booth could always rely on high pay and research productivity to stay competitive. By 2026, Booth had become an also-ran…at least according to The FT’s methodology.

Take Weighted Pay, which covers salary with three years of graduation. Booth grads averaged $231,939, good for 4th in the world. That might not be concerning – even if Booth traditionally topped the table in this dimension. Still, one number says it all: Booth’s Weighted Pay represented a $4,500 decline from the previous year, placing Booth alongside London Business School and HEC Paris as the only top-tier MBA programs to see its graduates’ pay dwindle over the previous year.

A SITUATION WHERE RANKINGS TRULY HELP

In The FT’s Research Ranking, Booth lost a spot, going from 2nd to 3rd in 2026. In alumni surveys, Booth saw its ranking continue to wane in Career Services and Alumni Network. The most damning data point, however, doesn’t even come from a dimension that’s weighed by the ranking methodology. In Satisfaction, Booth hit an all-time low of 9.05 – nearly .50 of a point less than where the school stood five years ago. In the process, Booth reached an all-time low, ranking 20th overall in 2026.

Alas, deans can make compelling arguments regarding the legitimacy of business rankings. In the case of the Booth School, rankings are serving their intended purpose. Across the board – regardless of methodology – they are showing their audience that something is amiss at Booth. Make no mistake: Booth is an elite business school that is clearly ranked far lower than it should in The Financial Times. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues that should be addressed and bridges that need to be mended.

In other words, it might be time for an autopsy at Booth, to bring the issues out into the open and forge a path forward.

6) A Tale Of Two Rival Business School Kingdoms

Even Harry Potter would have had difficulty choosing between Cambridge Judge and Oxford Said. While Cambridge owns the intellectual and structural soul of Harry Potter, Oxford owns the visual brand equity thanks to the films. After all, several key scenes from the films were shot at Christ Church College, whose Great Hall strongly resembles Hogwarts’ dining hall. And yet the tutorial-style teaching, ancient colleges, formal halls, and cloistered academic life that define Hogwarts are much closer to Cambridge’s collegiate system than Oxford’s.

All of that matters little to the Financial Times. But one thing is clear: This year, the FT crowns a clear Oxbridge winner and it’s not Oxford. Cambridge Judge’s full-time MBA program ranks a full ten places above Said, placing 17th to Oxford’s 27th. No less important, Cambridge has beaten Oxford’s FT rank in seven of the past ten years, even reaching as high as fifth place in 2017 while Oxford has never managed a Top Ten position over the past decade.

For Cambridge, it is a complete reversal from last year when its MBA program ranked 35th, its weakest showing on the FT list in ten years. In 2025,Oxford bested its rival by placing 26th–a gap of nine places.

How did Cambridge change its fortune? The best place to start is the one metric the Financial Times gathers but does not include in its ranking: overall satisfaction of alumni. Cambridge alums awarded the MBA program an impressive 9.193 on a ten-point scale with ten being the highest possible score, while Oxford languished well below the mid-point of the 100 schools in the ranking with  an 8.58.

The tale of the tape shows that Cambridge alums make more money than those at Oxford and have a more positive view of the value they received for their tuition dollars. More of them–nine out of ten–say their career goals have been achieved and that they are satisfied with the progress in their early careers. There are bigger and more notable gaps on several other metrics that should sound alarms in Oxford: alumni perceptions of the value of the MBA networks show much more appreciation among Cambridge alums than Oxford. The alumni network at Cambridge is ranked 27th vs. Oxford’s 61st, while alum satisfaction with the schools’ career services offices give Cambridge a rank of 42 vs. 79. These are more statistically meaningful results.

Oxford does best Cambridge on several metrics that may matter less to applicants, students, and graduates. Oxford has an edge on faculty research as well as the percentage of professors with PhDs. To students, those numbers send an uncomfortable signal that teaching has taken a back seat to research.

Next Page: Non-American business schools dominate the Top 10 and is Berkeley Haas’ rise temporary?

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