Harvard Nudges Aside Stanford For Top Honors In Financial Times’ Ranking

The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School  ranks first in academic research – Ethan Baron photo

EVERY TOP TEN SCHOOL IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH IS BASED IN THE U.S.

The Financial Times also does an analysis of the published research by a school’s faculty that is given a 10% weight in the overall ranking. A school’s research rank is based on the number of articles published by current full-time faculty members in 50 journals between January 2017 and August 2019. The rank combines the absolute number of publications with the number weighted relative to the faculty’s size.

Most striking about the results is the continued dominance of U.S. business schools. All of the top ten schools in research are in the U.S. led by Wharton, Harvard, Chicago Booth, Duke Fuqua, and Columbia Business School. In fact, U.S. schools occupy 21 of the top 25. The exceptions? London Business School is 11th on the list, while INSEAD is 18th, the University of Toronto 19th, and HEC Paris in 21st place.

Several of the U.S. schools in the top 25 on research fare much less well in the overall ranking. The University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, for example, ranks sixth-best in research, ahead of No. 8 MIT Sloan and No. 10 Stanford Graduate School of Business. Washington University’s Olin Business School also finishes in the top ten, ranking ninth. Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business takes 15th place on research, while the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management gets a rank of 20th.

The results here can vary significantly year-over-year because the period measured changes every year and some schools lose highly productive professors to rivals or retirement. Among this year’s top 25 in research, Dartmouth Tuck made the biggest advance, gaining six places to rank 12th from 18th last year. Indiana University was close behind, improving by five places to earn its rank of 15th.

The most significant research stumbles occurred at Stanford which lost seven places to fall to tenth this year from third in 2019. UC-Berkeley’s Haas School also dropped seven places to rank 16th, while both Cornell and Northwestern declined by six positions to rank 22nd and 24th, respectively (see below table). Only two years ago, Cornell ranked as high as fourth.

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