Setting The Pace: Poets&Quants Names HEC Paris Our 2026 Business School Of The Year

By any measure the industry uses, HEC Paris is at the summit. Its MBA climbed to sixth in the world in the 2026 Financial Times ranking, its master’s programs sit first on the planet in management, finance, and marketing by QS’s count, and it has held one of the top two spots in the FT’s European ranking every year since 2005. It is Poets&Quants’ 2026 Business School of the Year. And its dean would rather talk about almost anything else.

Éloïc Peyrache, a labor economist who has led HEC since 2020, is politely impatient with the rankings – “a marketing tool more than anything,” he says – and with the easy story they tell.

“Whenever you talk to someone about HEC, they talk about the quality of the students and the quality of the placement,” Peyrache tells P&Q. “My only obsession is really the impact of this institution, globally.”

That obsession has a name. Peyrache recently rolled out a roadmap he insisted on calling New Responsibilities, and the choice of word is deliberate.

“You could call it ‘Ambition Number One,'” he says. “That’s not what I wanted. We have a responsibility. These are new challenges, so it’s a new responsibility.”

CHANGING DESTINIES

The first of its three pillars is the most surprising coming from an elite Grande École: social mobility, aimed not at HEC’s own students but at people who will never reach HEC. The school now works with thousands of high schoolers a year from underprivileged areas to build their entrepreneurial instincts and their eloquence, and runs an entrepreneurship program for women from those same communities. Peyrache frames it less as charity than as self-interest, rightly understood.

“If social anger keeps rising, if social cohesion diminishes, if the world is on fire, you don’t have the right conditions for business to boom,” he says. “And if you don’t have business, you get more social anger. It goes both ways.”

RESEARCH AS A PUBLIC GOOD

The second pillar is about getting the school’s research out of the academy and into the hands of people who make decisions. HEC built a platform that summarizes its scholarship and distributes it free, through podcasts and plain-language explainers.

“The risk is that great research stays in the academic world,” Peyrache says. “Research is a public good, so let’s make it one, accessible, for free, and make sure it inspires people.”

What he wants, he says, is for a CEO to tell him not only that a new HEC hire is impressive, but something more. “I read that paper, and I’ve made different decisions because of it.”

It is already drawing the powerful to Paris with their confusion. CEOs come to him unsure about social cohesion and the future of work, and the school recently signed a partnership with Google and Accenture, with the U.S. company backing a European research effort, around exactly those questions.

THE FUTURE OF WORK

That effort runs through HEC’s LIFT lab, where Peyrache’s own discipline shows. Rather than pick a side among the AI prophets, the utopians, the doomers, and the economists who argue a “weak link” will keep productivity gains slow, the lab maps reality: which tasks workers actually want to automate and which they don’t, which jobs transform and which vanish, studied across thousands of people’s real daily use.

What keeps surfacing is a shift in what a business school should teach. For decades, Peyrache says, schools trained students to solve well-defined problems; now a machine will do that in seconds, and different models, ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, DeepSeek, hand back different answers. So the work moves to the edges, upstream to defining the problem and asking the right question, where he likes to note that Einstein claimed to spend most of an hour on the problem and only minutes on the solution, and downstream to implementation, where most of the value and most of the difficulty live. The people this demands, he says, are less the brilliant than the capable, and he has a favorite image for them, borrowed from an alumnus: a triangle of the artist who imagines tomorrow, the engineer who knows what will work, and the entrepreneur who connects the two and gets things done.

“People say you have to be bilingual,” he says. “I think it’s more than that, quadrilingual. You need to speak Python, speak quantum, to interact with those people. Your capability is to set the vision and get things done.”

A CAMPUS BUILT AROUND AN AGORA

Peyrache is betting €230 million that the building itself can teach some of this. He can see the first construction trucks from his office window, and admits he wishes he could close his eyes and wake up in five years with it finished. The vision came from an architect who studied the campus and found its two axes of symmetry crossing at a dead center of trees, benches, and grass.

“The middle should be an agora, where everybody meets,” Peyrache says. With 135 nationalities on campus, some from countries at war, he adds, “you want to build bridges, not dams.”

So the Campus of the Future is organized around a central gathering place and a ring of innovation spaces where the school’s research centers will take turns “owning” the room to crack a live problem, with flexible rooms that let a class flow into working groups and back without emptying one space to fill another. Seen from above, the architect told him, the heart of it looks like a hand, a connector reaching toward the historical buildings, the dorms, and the ground still left open for whatever comes next.

SETTING THE PACE

All of this arrives at a moment when Europe’s best schools are winning students who once assumed they would cross the Atlantic, and Peyrache’s explanation is characteristically unsentimental: HEC is starting to offer what the U.S. used to. Recently it launched its first undergraduate degree, a Bachelor of Arts and Science built with Bocconi that pairs heavy doses of math, data, and AI with social science, economics, geopolitics, and philosophy, holding business itself until the master’s level. American students, he says, are now among its most common nationalities.

The pitch is partly about price.

“We’re doing at least as well as they do,” he says, “for a third or a fourth of the price.” The gap, he argues, even reshapes who takes risks: U.S. students arrive surprised by the entrepreneurial energy on campus, which Peyrache ties directly to tuition. Where high debt pushes an American graduate to take a job first and pay down loans, a lower-cost European degree makes it easier to simply start something.

Which returns to the paradox at the center of his school’s moment. HEC sits atop rankings its dean refuses to be measured by, pouring a fortune into an agora and training problem-definers he’d rather call quadrilingual than brilliant, all in the service of a conviction that a business school’s job is to help repair the conditions business depends on. It is not chasing the American elite, but setting a pace they now have to answer. Peyrache, characteristically, frames it as an obligation rather than a victory.

“We have a duty, we have a responsibility,” he says. “Let’s make sure we do it as well as we can.”

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