Five Biggest Surprises In Fortune’s First MBA Ranking

4) The U.S. Isn’t The Only Place In The World To Get An MBA

We would not have thought it important to remind people that management education is a global marketplace. While U.S. business schools invented and perfected the MBA experience, the best programs are hotly competitive with those in Europe, Canada, and Asia. INSEAD, London Business School, HEC Paris, IESE Business School in Spain are not only among the leaders in business education in Europe. They are leaders in business education in the world.

The applicant pool acknowledges this reality because an increasingly number of applicants apply to schools on different continents. They routinely mix and match their target schools, and many candidates, including those in the U.S., prefer to have a more global experience at a non-U.S. school.

The Financial Times recognized this shift 22 years ago when the British newspaper came out with the first credible global ranking of MBA programs. The Economist followed. And both Businessweek and Forbes publish separate international rankings beside their domestic lists. Many of these schools considered themselves peers with the very best U.S. MBA programs. And INSEADm with its campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi, now sits at the top of the FT ranking. By the way, the MBA programs at London Business School and IESE Business School in Barcelona currently are among the top five in this year’s Financial Times ranking.

Fortune, however, seems to have a more myopic view of the elite. At a time when business is more global than ever, Fortune completely neglected the world market for management education. Its debut ranking doesn’t even acknowledge any of the great business schools anywhere else in the world, not even those to the north of the U.S. border in Canada where superb MBA programs are available from a range of excellent schools from Western University’s Ivey Business School to McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management.

It is as if Fortune is still living in what was meant to be the American Century in the 1950s when many Americans believed there couldn’t possibly be anything worth covering outside the good old U.S.A. Those days are long gone, and we’re the better for it.

5. A Discernible Trend For Larger, Underrated, Urban Programs

When pay is so central to a ranking so is location. Larger, underrated urban MBA programs tend to do well in the Fortune ranking. Just look at the University of Maryland just outside D.C., which landed in 26th place; Boston University, ranked 34th, and 35th place Southern Methodist University in Dallas. And come to think of it, smaller programs in or near larger urban markets seem to do well, too. Think Fordham University in New York City, which ended up ranked 38th, and UC-Davis, not far from San Francisco, in 27th place.

How come? Because graduates from these programs tend to stick in and around those urban centers, and people tend to have bigger paychecks in cities rather than college towns or rural areas. After all, the cost of living is higher, too.

That, of course, makes sense when your ranking is mainly based on starting salaries. But what that has to do with the quality of the MBA experience is another matter.

DON’T MISS: FORTUNE DEBUTS A NEW MBA RANKING