The Warwick Business School MBA: What You Need To Know

It might not have the glamor of some big cities, but Coventry in England’s West Midlands is home to one of the best-respected and oldest business schools in Europe. Less than two hours from London, Warwick Business School also known as WBS is situated in a prime, central location in the countryside. The B-School ranked 6th in the UK in the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking 2023.

Designed for those who wish to change job functions, sectors, locations or simply increase their earning power, the Warwick MBA supports students in achieving their full potential. Warwick’s fast-paced 1-year MBA is highly diverse, with students from 33 nationalities, on average age 32.

Warwick MBAs complete eight required modules, four elective modules, and have the option to undertake either a strategic consulting project, focused on practicing for an employment setting or a dissertation theoretically demonstrating an MBA’s ability to take multiple perspectives on a business issue.

“The interactions with my cohort on the learning platform and during lectures are my favorite part of the program, as everyone shares their understanding based on their unique viewpoints,” says MBA Katie Esarey on Warwick’s site.

Warwick offers a range of elective modules to suit individual needs and to give MBAs a global perspective. One of the four electives will be a required overseas module at one of Warwick’s partner institutions.

To be accepted into the MBA program, Warwick wants to see that prospective MBAs are intellectually outstanding and display strong interpersonal and communication skills, motivation, creativity, maturity, drive, and leadership qualities. They must have the ability to work effectively in a team, the desire to learn, and the potential to succeed.

Students can also attend a Partnership in International Management (PIM) membership – a network of more than 60 business schools established over 30 years ago to promote MBA exchange between European and North American schools. Grads attend for a period of between 2-4 months after completing the MBA.

Career outcomes look great, with 93% of graduates employed within 3 months of graduation. Graduates work at a variety of companies, including Amazon, BP, JP Morgan.

John Colley, Associate Dean

A good MBA should aim to be relevant to current real-world practice, and one way we do this is with our Professors of Practice, who are incredibly popular with students. The real world is far messier and more interesting than the textbooks would have you believe, and they bring that home.

Employers want leaders with real, practical experience and that is what our MBA aims to produce. To that end, we have increased the innovation and digital elements in the course. We look for ambitious, driven people, but we are very careful not to have too many big egos in the classroom. We strive for diversity in all senses.

Son Kwon, USA, Warwick MBA 2018

A lot of people ask me, “You are an American and there are a lot of good business schools, so why did you go to the UK?” The answer is the international experience. I have worked in America and Asia, so I wanted to get exposure to somewhere new. Also, Warwick is genuinely diverse. In the U.S., lots of people have different backgrounds, but are largely Americanized. Here they genuinely come from other cultures.

I am looking to change professions and I am interested in consultancy, so the strategy modules and the consultancy project appealed to me. Warwick might not have the same recognition as Harvard or Stanford, but I think their brands crowd out an awful lot of great European business schools. I have seen Warwick on a lot of people’s CVs in my industry.

Warwick Business School MBA Rankings Data

WBS Rankings Analysis

Warwick Business School tends to do well in Poets and Quants’ composite ranking-of-rankings and placed a very creditable fifteenth in the world in the most recent, 2019 list of international (that is, non-US) schools. That is a jump from the previous year when it fell to 24th, but in line with its position since 2015, when it came 14th before rising to the heights of 12th in 2016 and 2017.

In the Economist’s list, WBS ranked fifth of all non-US schools in 2019, down from third in 2018 and fourth in 2017. It fared almost as well in the two preceding years, finishing at sixth both times.

Why does Warwick pace so well in that ranking? Perhaps because the Economist heavily weights “opening new career opportunities”, which accounts for 35% of its total ranking. Because around 90 percent of students on the WBS full-time MBA are international, they tend to do well in terms of new job opportunities — many of them find jobs in the UK or other Western European countries, and the school’s careers service is well geared-up for helping them do so.

“Student assessment of careers service” accounts for about 10 percent of the total Economist ranking. Network (10 percent) and internationalization (7 percent) also favor UK schools with large numbers of overseas students.

The school fares almost as well in the Forbes list, appearing as the eighth highest-ranked non-US school in 2019, 2016, and 2015, although it dropped to 14th in 2017 and 2018. Forbes’ methodology is extremely simple: return on investment, calculated by comparing alumni’s projected salary increase if they hadn’t taken an MBA, compared to what it is five years after graduation.

Forbes’ ranking has the heaviest weight for international schools in the Poets and Quants composite list, and Warwick does well in Forbes because students tend to come from countries with lower salaries than in the countries where they find jobs. Therefore ROI looks very impressive for Warwick MBAs. A word of warning, though: because Forbes’ ranking is based solely on self-reported salary, it is possible that it suffers from selection bias — are high-earners are more likely to respond?

In the Financial Times’ list, WBS has only ever once broken into the top 20 non-US schools, in 2019, when it peaked at 18th place. In 2020 it fell back slightly to 20th. In previous years it was ranked 22nd, 24th, 27th and 21st. It is dragged down by a relatively low salary-increase rating – which is odd, given its high ROI on the Forbes list.

Warwick’s appearances in the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking — which also takes into account a range of factors, placed it pretty much in line with the FT’s — it came in 23rd and 22nd in 2017 and 2016 and has never appeared in other years. That low ranking is perhaps because Bloomberg weights salary increase heavily — it accounts for almost 40 percent of the ranking — but measures it soon after graduation. The lesson from the rankings seems to be that the longer after graduation salary is measured, the better WBS grads do.