User's Guide to Full-Time MBA Rankings
Ranking publications are a widely used source of information among prospective graduate business school students. Rankings are appealing because they provide some level of clarity and order in a marketplace that is highly complex. They curate diverse data points from a variety of sources into a simple, easily comparable measure of overall quality.
The inherent issue is that quality is highly subjective and there is no universally agreed upon way to measure it.
For that reason, multiple rankings have emerged for graduate business programs, each with its own methodology that draws upon a different mix of data indicators and weights. As a result, different publications rank schools differently. What’s more, rankings are volatile year over year, often for reasons having little to do with a change in the quality of education being provided to students. Frequently, the net result of the existence of multiple rankings is not less confusion among applicants, but more.
The purpose of this resource is to clearly lay out what goes into the methodologies of the five major business school rankings and compile other useful rankings information in one place.
The purpose of this resource is to clearly lay out what goes into the methodologies of the five major business school rankings, identify aspects of each that make them distinctive, and compile other useful ranking information in one place.
Weighting Overview
Each ranking publication uses its own unique methodology to assign weights to various data indicators. The greater the weight, the greater influence it has on determining a school’s ranking.
This table compares how the methodologies assign weights across 15 common weighting categories. Hover over a ranking’s column to reveal its key drivers—the categories that have the most impact on schools’ rankings.
| Weighting Category | Bloomberg | Economist | Financial Times | Forbes | USNWR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alumni opinion | 3% | ||||
| Business school leader opinion | 25% | ||||
| Career services rating | 11.7% | 3% | |||
| Compensation | 37.3% | 20% | 40% | 14% | |
| Employer opinion | 15% | ||||
| Employment outcomes | 23.3% | 8% | 21% | ||
| Entrepreneurship | 15.7% | ||||
| Faculty quality | 8.8% | 15% | |||
| Gender parity | 2.9% | 5% | |||
| Internationalization | 7.3% | 20% | |||
| Learning | 21.3% | 3% | |||
| Network | 25.7% | 10% | |||
| Return on investment | 3% | 100% | |||
| Student selectivity | 8.75% | 25% | |||
| Student/recent graduate opinion | 7.3% |