The M7: Still (Mostly) The Most Magnificent Of Them All

It’s been a good year in the rankings for Stanford GSB, which was named the top school in the world by The Financial Times in January, then named No. 1 by both Bloomberg Businessweek and Poets&Quants. Stanford photo

How The M7 Rank Against Each Other — And The World

One fact of business school life can be counted on year to year: The M7 schools will be at or near the top in every ranking. Here at Poets&Quants, the schools are Nos. 1 through 7 in our 2019 ranking; in the previous two years they were in the top eight, with UC-Berkeley Haas crashing the party. P&Q‘s composite ranking puts Stanford on top this year; Bloomberg Businessweek and The Financial Times agree. In the U.S. News ranking, thanks to ties, none of the seven schools drops below sixth place; in Forbes, none is below seventh. That’s not the case for FT, which does a global ranking that includes schools outside the U.S., nor the Economist, which has a puzzling and questionable methodology. In the newest FT ranking, Kellogg is 14th, down from 12th last year, and Columbia is ninth, down from seventh; but in the latest Economist ranking, Kellogg is third, down from first just two years ago, and MIT is 16th, having dropped from 14th last year.

Below, to provide a better picture of a school’s strengths and weaknesses, we’ve also compiled the U.S. News ranking of programs by discipline. These numbers are nearly a year old and will be refreshed in March when U.S. News releases its new ranking. The final table on this page parses some more data from the U.S. News and Financial Times rankings: U.S. News‘ scores from corporate recruiters and academics and The Financial Times‘ alumni recommendation and academic research rankings, as well as FT‘s salary increase figures.