INSEAD Claims First For Fifth Time In A Row

HOW EUROPEAN MBA PROGRAMS STACK UP AGAINST THEIR U.S. COUNTERPARTS

Readers often ask, however, how international MBA programs stack up against those in the U.S. If you were to simply mash together the three global MBA rankings from the FT, The Economist and Businessweek (Forbes still publishes separate rankings for U.S. and international programs), just four of the top 20 full-time MBA programs in the world are outside the U.S. and every one of them is in Europe. This year the highest-ranked non-U.S. program is at INSEAD in 13th place, just behind Yale’s School of Management and just ahead of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business which is 14th (see table below). HEC Paris comes in 15th place, IESE Business School in Barcelona ranks 19th, while London Business School placed 20th in the mashup.

Not surprisingly, the differences among school positions across the three global rankings are even more wildly divergent when you include the U.S. MBA programs. Only at the very top mainly for U.S. schools can you find much agreement  INSEAD is a good example of this phenomenon. While the FT ranks the school’s MBA program in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore, third, but The Economist places it 22nd and Bloomberg Businessweek puts the school’s ten-month MBA program in 23rd place. Meantime, the University of Virginia’s Darden School, which earned its highest rank (fifth place) ever in Businessweek this year, gets something of a snub from the FT which places it 23rd on its global MBA ranking. The Economist has Darden 16th.

These major differences help to explain why you should never look at a single ranking but instead take a broader view of a school’s standing across the most influential lists. That is exactly what Poets&Quants attempts to do with its annual composite rankings. In one glance, you can see where each school ranks on all the influential lists, how their ranks changed year-over-year, and then how it all comes together in an uber ranking.