The Top 100 Business Schools, Ranked By Research

Rules are rules. When you construct a comprehensive ranking of business schools, the schools that compete must be judged on an even playing field — which means when one of them fails to meet the minimum threshold for participation, that school must be excluded, no matter how elite or influential. It wouldn’t be fair to the process and the other participating schools otherwise.

That’s what happened to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in February. Failing to meet the minimum alumni response for The Financial Times‘ 2023 ranking of global MBA programs, Wharton was dropped from the ranking entirely despite having been No. 1 on the FT’s list the year before. And because of that exclusion, Wharton was naturally not included in the FT’s sub-ranking of top research schools — despite the fact that it is widely acknowledged to be among the leading research institutions on the planet, having been No. 2 in research according to the FT last year. This year, FT ranked Harvard the No. 1 research B-school for the second year in a row, followed by Columbia Business School, Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, Chicago Booth School of Business, and UCLA Anderson School of Management.

However, Wharton had better fortune in the other major research ranking, released March 23. The University of Texas-Dallas Jindal School of Management’s Top 100 Business Schools Research Rankings, based on scholarly publications by a school’s faculty, placed Wharton first on both its North American and Worldwide lists — in both cases outpacing the next-closest schools by considerable margins.

TOP FT RESEARCH SCHOOLS: GROUNDBREAKING WORK, WIDELY PUBLISHED

The exclusion of Wharton from its overall ranking and the ripple effect of dropping such a widely acknowledged research leader is an omission that hurts The Financial Times ranking more than it damages the school. FT’s research rank is based on the number of articles by a B-school’s full-time faculty in 50 internationally recognized academic and practitioner journals. The rank, which accounts for 10% of a school’s total score in the overall ranking, combines the number of publications from January 2020 to July 2022, with the number weighted relative to faculty size.

Of course, Wharton belongs on — and near, or at, the top — of any research ranking. The Philadelphia school is home to more than 20 research centers and initiatives, in every subject from analytics to public policy to social impact, which serve as a hub for exchange and study between faculty, students, and members of the business community. Rather than the kind of dry academic output that no one ever reads, the scholarly work that emerges from Wharton generates new courses, programs, and community outreach, as well as partnerships between academics, industry, and government, all in the service of addressing pressing global business challenges.

The same is true of Harvard, atop the 2023 FT research ranking for the second straight year, with 11 research centers and regional offices around the world, as well as the other leading schools on the FT’s list. They include Columbia, the overall No. 1 in FT’s 2023 global MBA ranking, which has six major academic divisions from Accounting to Management to Marketing under which research is conducted, categorized, and published. Cornell Johnson, ranked No. 3 for research by FT, boasts industry-leading centers like the Parker Center for Investment Research and the Smith Family Business Initiative. UCLA Anderson’s research is frequently written up in The New York Times and Forbes and covered by such media outlets as Fox News and CNN; as the school proclaims, “our reach and influence is felt through the work of our best-selling authors, groundbreaking studies, and Anderson’s Human Resources Round Table, where we engage academic and practitioner knowledge of cutting-edge human resources topics with the 50 corporate HR executives who are members.”

Overall, all of the top seven, nine of the top 10, and 18 of the top 20 research schools as ranked by The Financial Times are based in the United States. INSEAD, of France and Singapore, is the first non-U.S. school, at No. 8.

WHARTON PROFS PUBLISHED NEARLY 400 ARTICLES FROM 2018 TO 2022

The twin rankings released annually by UT-Dallas are constructed differently. Whereas the FT’s ranking weighs number of publications over a 30-month span, the Jindal School’s ranking looks at a school’s number of publications in a five-year span, in the most recent case from 2018 to 2022 (last year’s ranking was for 2017 to 2021, the ranking before that was for 2016 to 2020, etc.). In that span, Wharton had an incredible 396 articles published in one of 24 journals in major business disciplines — Journal of Finance, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Marketing Research, etc. That’s up from 380 articles in the previous ranking released in 2022, 353 articles in 2021, and 323 in 2020. The No. 2 research school this year on both the North American and Worldwide rankings, UT-Dallas itself, had 275 articles published from 2018 to 2022.

UT-Dallas provides a tool to study research articles published in the leading business journals; that database contains author information on all research published since 1990. A single-authored article gets the author’s affiliated school a score of 1; the ranking addresses the issue of shared authorship by giving each school a score of p/n, where p is the number of authors from the same school and there are a total of n authors on the article.

If an author lists multiple schools, each of the schools that author is affiliated with gets a corresponding scaled score. For example, if one of the n authors lists m affiliations, each school that the author is affiliated with gets a score of 1/nm. In this way, Wharton achieved a score of 204.86, the only school to reach 200 points; UT-Dallas had 134.05, followed by Columbia (130.12), Harvard (129.73), and USC’s Marshall School of Business and Leventhal School of Accounting, which combined for 127.30 points.

U.S. SCHOOLS ONCE AGAIN DOMINATE BOTH UT-DALLAS RANKINGS

The top 10 schools on both the UT-Dallas North American and Worldwide rankings were the same this year (see the next pages for details, including the complete rankings). The first deviation on the global list comes at No. 11, where INSEAD (226 articles, 101.70 points) supplants the University of Michigan Ross School of Business (215 articles, 97.73 points). INSEAD ranked 12th last year.

Overall on the Worldwide ranking, the United States accounts for 65 places, down from 66 last year. Notable non-U.S. schools are London Business School at 26th place, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) at 28th, HEC Paris at 45th, and Italy’s SDA Bocconi at 53rd.

On the North American ranking, the first non-U.S. school is the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management at No. 19, up from No. 22 last year; in all, Canada has eight schools on the list this year, same as last year, but all except Rotman ranked below No. 35. B-schools in Mexico and Central America were shut out once again this year.

See pages 2 and 3 for the 100-school UT-Dallas North American and Worldwide rankings, and page 4 for the 100 top research schools as ranked by The Financial Times.

AND DON’T MISS LAST YEAR’S STORY ON THE TOP 100 BUSINESS SCHOOLS RANKED BY RESEARCH and THE FINANCIAL TIMES 2023 MBA RANKING: THE BIGGEST BOMBSHELL IS WHARTON’S DISAPPEARANCE

LISTEN: OUR WEEKLY BUSINESS CASUAL PODCAST ON THE VALUE OF ACADEMIC RESEARCH AT BUSINESS SCHOOLS