CEIBS celebrated its 30th year in 2024. Courtesy photo

9) Asian Sensations

From 2019-2020, CEIBS was the toast of The Financial Times MBA Ranking. Ranked 5th in the world, CEIBS was a testament to Asia becoming the next great frontier. It was a graduate business school that combined the best of East and West. Plus, the school’s Shanghai location is among the world’s largest startup ecosystems and home to Fortune 500 companies like SAIC Motor and Bank of Communications.

In recent years, CEIBS has come down to Earth, so to speak. In 2024, for example, it ranked 21st, before bouncing up to 12th last year.

Now, it is the highest-ranked MBA program in Asia, finishing 8th – higher than either Harvard Business School or Northwestern Kellogg. The school’s secret? It ranks among the Top 50 business schools just about everywhere…but doesn’t dominate any single category.

THE SECRET TO CEIBS: CONSISTENCY

In Weighted Salary, CEIBS ranks 17th, above average and better than higher-ranked programs like Esade and HEC Paris. In Salary Percentage Increase – worth the same 16% share as Weighted Salary – CEIBS’ average is better than any Top 10 school. In Research, which involves a 10% weight, the school places 37th, ranking 9th among Top 10 business schools…but 5th among its Asian peers.

Bottom line: CEIBS is solid across the board – with few visible weaknesses. More than that, it is a highly cosmopolitan program, where 56% of the faculty hail from outside China and 53% of the students are women.

Better still, CEIBS overtook its cross-town rival, the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, to again reign as the top MBA program in Asia.

FOUR ASIAN PROGRAMS AMONG THE TOP 15

Of course, CEIBS isn’t the only Asian program making a statement in the 2026 Financial Times MBA Ranking. Singapore’s Nanyang University jumped from 22nd to 12th, with the Indian School of Business (ISB) covering even more ground: 27th to 12th. At the same time, Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management also joined the conversation. Over two years, it has raced up 23 spots to settle in at 14th.

Each school brings different advantages to the table. Nanyang University accelerates its students’ careers. The program ranked 2nd for Value for Money and 8th for Career Progress. At ISB, graduates experienced a 248% increase in pre-MBA pay – higher than any other graduate business school in the world. And ISB graduates gave their Alumni Network the highest score of any MBA program in Asia. Peking University houses the #2 Career Services center in the world according to alumni surveys. Not coincidentally, the school also ranked 2nd for Career Progress (and 12th for its Alumni Network).

Along the way, Nanyang University overtook its more recognized rival, the National University of Singapore, as Singapore’s top MBA program. ISB further distanced itself from IIM Ahmedabad as India’s top business school. And Peking University reinforced its position as the #2 MBA program in China.

A “DEEP BENCH” IN ASIA

In fact, you’ll now find 11 MBA programs among The Financial Times’ Top 40 – two more than the previous year. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology moved up 12 spots to 24th, with Hong Kong University trailing close behind at 33rd after improving by 8 spots. The National University of Singapore cracked the Top 30 at 29th, an 8-spot improvement. Let’s not forget IIM Bangalore, which leaped 23 spots to reach 34h.

Even more, Asia boasts a deep bench outside the Top 50. Singapore Management University (Lee Kong Chian) debuted this year at 57th, while IIM Calcutta (53rd) and IIM Lucknow (58th) improved by 8 and 13 spots respectively. Further down, you’ll find IIM Indore (62nd) and IIM Kozhikode (65th), which represent improvements of 13 and 21 spots respectively.

In other words, Asia is increasingly where MBA programs are surging according to The Financial Times’ methodology. If this pattern holds true, these schools could soon be displacing European and American programs at the higher bands of this ranking.

The FT now ranks Tuck’s MBA program 26th but the newspaper’s alumni survey puts Tuck’s alumni network first in the world

10) The Hidden Secrets In This Ranking

If there’s one mistake readers make with the Financial Times MBA ranking, it’s treating the ordinal number as the story. It isn’t. The real intelligence is hiding in the footnotes, the sub-tables, and the oddly weighted data points that barely move the needle of the final score but reveal far more about what an MBA actually delivers. Rankings flatten complexity; the underlying data restores it.

Take Dartmouth Tuck, for example. The school lands a thoroughly uninspiring 26th overall this year—hardly a position that would quicken the pulse of an applicant or admissions dean (a mere two years ago the FT ranked Tuck 12th). Yet dig one layer deeper and Tuck ranks number one in the value of its alumni network, a metric the FT assigns just 4% of the total ranking weight. That’s not a rounding error; it’s a philosophical choice.

And it’s a curious one. Because while rankings obsess over salary arbitrage and international mobility, a central reason young professionals go to business school in the first place is to buy into a powerful, enduring network—one that opens doors long after the signing bonus is spent. In other words, the FT quietly confirms what many applicants already believe, even as its headline ranking encourages them to ignore it.

There are quite a few of these hidden truths in the data underlying the ranking.  Yet, you also need to look not merely at one year data which is subject to peculiar anomalies but how a school might perform over several years. Tuck, for example. topped the alumni network metric last year. It’s also a finding reinforced by the fact that Tuck bests every rival on the percentage of alums who donate to the school annually. More than 70% of Tuck graduates contribute to the annual campaign, a figure more than double the average giving rate of other business schools.

So what other truths can be gleaned from the FT data dump? Consider alumni views of their career services office. Which U.S. MBA programs have made the Top Ten in the past three years? Georgia Tech, Dartmouth Tuck, NYU Stern, Georgia Terry, and Northwestern Kellogg. From past experience, we also know that satisfaction scores on careers often shows the most variation so it is less susceptible to cheerleading by alums.

The category that may well be the most important–overall satisfaction with a school’s entire program–is not weighted in the FT ranking but it is a data point that is collected. Only two MBA programs made the Top Ten on this metric over the past three years: IESE Business School in Spain and Harvard Business School. Stanford was number one in overall satisfaction when the FT last ranked it in 2024 with one of the highest scores ever recorded: 9.975 on a ten-point scale with ten being the highest possible.

In the end, the FT ranking is less a definitive scoreboard than a sprawling spreadsheet begging to be read with skepticism and curiosity. The headline order will come and go—Stanford in, Stanford out; Tuck up, Tuck down—but the deeper signals endure: who feels supported by career services, who would choose the program again, whose alumni show up year after year with their checkbooks and their time. Those are not trivial footnotes; they are proxies for culture, community, and long-term value. So by all means glance at the ordinal rank. Then ignore it. The real story of what an MBA delivers isn’t in the number beside a school’s name. It’s in the data the ranking barely bothers to count.

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