As sure as September follows August, you can pretty much bet on one sure thing. When the Financial Times ranks master’s in management (MiM) programs, the University of St. Gallen will be on top.

In the past 15 years, from 2011 until this year, St. Gallen’s tiny and highly selective MiM program in Switzerland has claimed first place on the Financial Times MiM ranking 14 out of 15 times. Ever since making its debut on this annual list in 2010, when St. Gallen came in fourth, it has been the single most dominant school in any ranking. Only once during the 15-year span, in 2023, did it fail to top the list. In that year, St. Gallen slipped to second place behind HEC Paris.

And so in 2025, St. Gallen has done it again, capturing first place on the Financial Times MiM ranking published today (Sept. 7).  It helps, of course, that the program’s enrollment is a mere 54 students, a small more controllable number of candidates. Second place HEC Paris boasts a MiM enrollment that is more than ten times that of St. Gallen at 578 students, while third place INSEAD now has 201 students in its relatively new master’s in management program. Nova School of Business and Economics in Portugal and Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in China share fourth place in the 2025 Financial Times MiM ranking.

Financial Times Top Ten Master’s In Management Programs For 2025

2025 Rank & School	Y-O-Y Change	2024 Rank	Alumni Satisfaction Score	Employment Rate 3 Months After Graduation	Alumni Salary
1. St. Gallen	——–	1	8.93	98%	$139,921
2. HEC Paris	——–	2	9.00	99%	$141,611
3. INSEAD	——–	3	9.62	92%	$127,377
4. Nova School of Business	+4	8	9.14	99%	$123,485
4. Tsinghua University	——–	NR	9.05	100%	$115,495
6. Shanghai Jiao Tong	-1	5	9.99	100%	$128,449
7. ESCP Business School	-1	6	8.95	100%	$113,293
8. Tongji University	+5	13	9.06	100%	$160,163
9. Stockholm	+6	15	9.64	96%	$109,343
10. London Business School	-4	6	9.16	90%	$122,909
10. Essec Business School	——–	10	8.93	99%	$118,747

ST. GALLEN MAY DOMINATE THE OVERALL RANKING BUT THE PROGRAM IS MUCH LESS IMPRESSIVE THAN MANY OTHERS

St. Gallen’s program is hardly infallible, however. Some 34 other programs boast overall satisfaction scores from alumni that exceed the 8.93 given to St. Gallen by its own surveyed graduates. The top five based on this metric? Shanghai Jiao Tong University earned the highest grade, a near-perfect 9.99, followed by Belgium’s Vlerick Business School, the Stockholm School of Economics (9.64), INSEAD and Barcelona’s IESE Business School (both at 9.62). By the way, this is a measure that isn’t even included in the weighting for the Financial Times MiM ranking, although it is one of the most important metrics collected by the Financial Times.

Some 43 programs produced alumni who were able to achieve higher percentage increases in their salaries than the 44% gain reported by St. Gallen’s alumni. That metric — accounting for 10% of the ranking — is based on the average difference in alumni salary between their first MiM-level job after completing the course and their current salary, three years after finishing. The top performer on this measure was Poland’s  Kozminski University whose graduates reported a whopping 94% jump in salary. That may be why St. Gallen’s career progress rank is 69th, meaning 68 of the 100 ranked programs produced alumni have had greater success as measured by their changes in the level of seniority and the size of the organization for whom they work.

If you’re looking for U.S. schools on this list, don’t bother. While the FT says its ranking is global, almost all the U.S. MiM programs pay no attention to it, refusing to cooperate with the Financial Times MiM ranking. This includes Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg, MIT Sloan, Michigan Ross, Duke Fuqua, and Carnegie Mellon, among many others. In other words, there are U.S. MiMs at some of the very best business schools in the world with reputations and outcomes that far exceeds many of the schools on the FT‘s list. Kellogg’s MiM boasts career stats that can match or better most of the FT schools, with 93% of Kellogg’s grads landing jobs with average starting base salaries of $85,500 for last year’s graduating class.

AFTER ACCUSATIONS OF CHEATING, TBS EDUCATION DISAPPEARS FROM RANKING

The only U.S. entrants are Hult International Business School, which has campuses all over the world, and the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business. Hult’s program ranks 42nd, while Moore comes in at 94th.

TBS Education, the French school with campuses in Toulouse, Paris, Barcelona, and Casablanca, disappeared completely from this year’s ranking. Earlier this year in March, a graduate of the school’s Master in Management program publicly accused the school of cheating in the ranking. The FT confirmed it had launched an investigation. After appearing on this ranking for 19 consecutive years since 2006, TBS Education is nowhere to be found this year.

The Financial Times started this ranking 20 years ago in 2005. The inaugural ranking featured only 25 schools, with HEC Paris at the top. The list now includes 100 master’s in management programs mostly in Europe and Asia. These programs bounce around on the list like a soccer ball on a pitch. This year 39 of the 100 programs rose or fall by double-digits, including ten who were not even ranked in 2024 but achieved ranks that show a rise of at least ten places. That is an extraordinary rate of change in programs that are essentially the same as they were a year earlier.

Some of the ups and downs are truly eye-opening and head-scratching. Two schools — Louvain School of Management and HEC Lausanne — plunged 28 places this year to rank 74th and 75th, respectively. The University of Ljubljana in Slovenia surged 26 positions to rank 44th.

SEVEN SCHOOLS — ALL IN FRANCE — BOAST MIM ENROLLMENTS OF MORE THAN 1,000 STUDENTS

The master in management is the predominant graduate business degree in Europe and much in demand. Seven of the ranked schools now boast student enrollments in excess of 1,000, all of them based in France. The largest is ESCP Business School, ranked seventh best, with 1,459 students, followed by Kedge Business School, with 1,322 students, and Essca School of Management, with 1,211 students.

Yet not all these programs can boast successful placement rates for their graduates. Only 54% of the graduates from Lancaster University Management School landed jobs three months after graduation. That is the lowest employment rate for any of the 100 ranked programs on the Financial Times MiM ranking. Western University’s Ivey Business School wasn’t much better at 56%. And at the University of South Carolina, four of every ten graduates were without jobs three months after commencement.

Still, 24 of the 100 schools were able to place all of their graduates in this timeframe, according to the Financial Times which also reported the percentage of respondents from which that data was based. So while the FT reports that Italy’s SDA Bocconi, ranked 13th on this list, has a 100% placement rate for its MiM program, only 66% of its graduates responded to the survey, one of the lowest response rates for any school.

REPORTED SALARIES ARE ARTIFICIALLY INFLATED AND DISTORTED BY THE FINANCIAL TIMES

While a program’s employment rate is given a mere 5% weighting in the ranking, it is arguably the single most important metric for an MiM program. After all, most students enter these programs partly because their employment prospects out of undergraduate school are not what they expected. The MiM makes them job ready, able to immediately contribute in a business job. Yet, the Financial Times put an equal weighting on such metrics as international faculty, international students, female faculty, female students and many of the other 19 criteria used to rank the programs.

The current average (weighted) salary of alumni is given the highest weighting of any category, at 16%. But local salaries are converted to U.S. dollars using purchasing power parity rates that artificially inflate and distort the actual salary data. This year the highest salaries went to graduates of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. The purchasing power formula inflates that compensation to $181,239. But the school’s own placement reports put the starting salaries at under $45,000. It’s no wonder that six of the seven highest reported salaries in this ranking are all from schools in India. The only exception was China’s Tongji University’s School of Economics and Management at $160,163.

Nonetheless, the FT‘s MiM ranking contains many fascinating data points, all worth exploring for applicants to make informed choices, particularly in Europe and Asia.

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