MBA Rankings Explained

Today, three MBA rankings dominate the conversation: US News, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Each one runs a different formula on a different pile of data – this is why the same school can rank #1 on one list and #26 on another in the same year. In this article, we’ll cover what each ranking measures, where the numbers come from, and why the lists disagree as badly as they do. By the time you’re done reading this, you should be in an educated position to determine how much rankings mean to you when choosing your target schools.

What an MBA Ranking Actually Measures

Every MBA ranking is a weighted average. Each publication – US News, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek – decides which handful of factors it wants to measure about a business school. Each factor gets assigned a weight, and all of those values get converted onto a ranking’s common scale. Each school then gets sorted according to the value that was calculated by that scale.

As you can imagine, not every list weighs the same factors evenly, or even considers them for their calculations in the first place. This is why the lists disagree with each other so heavily.

Here are the ways each ranking collects data:

• They use the data schools report about themselves. Things like median GMAT and GRE® scores, undergraduate GPAs, acceptance rates, employment rates at graduation and three months out, starting salaries and signing bonuses fit into this category. Schools calculate these internally and submit them directly to the publications. You might recognize some of these as what also appears on the employment reports that schools publish on their own websites – you can always go look at the underlying numbers yourself, rather than trusting someone else’s weighted summary of them.
• Surveys. This is where things can get a little interesting. Some lists ask business school deans to rate other business schools. Some ask corporate recruiters. Some survey current students about their experience, or alumni about their salaries several years after graduation. Survey data is where rankings get strange, because response rates vary wildly by school, and a school that doesn’t push its alumni to fill out the form can be penalized for something that has nothing to do with the quality of its program.
• Third-party data. A smaller category, but growing. Career-outcome data pulled from LinkedIn, research citation counts, and student-experience scores collected by other organizations.

This weighting system is what forms the core of the editorial judgment from each publication, so it’s vital that before you make any decisions based on a ranking, you understand what factors went into a school attaining that ranking. When a publication decides that starting salary counts for 20% of a school’s score and acceptance rate counts for 2%, it’s made a very specific claim about what makes an MBA program good. In our humble opinion, you should definitely understand the basis of that claim before you make any life-altering decisions based on it!

The MBA Rankings That Still Publish A List

When most people think of MBA rankings, there are three lists that drive most of the conversation:

• US News & World Report, the “Best Business Schools” ranking, which covers US programs only and is the one most people mean when they say “MBA rankings”;
• The Financial Times, which ranks programs across the globe; and
• Bloomberg Businessweek, which leans heavily on surveys of students, alumni, and recruiters.

There are a few others you may encounter that aren’t as well known:

• QS, which produces a global MBA ranking with a heavy emphasis on employability and return on investment;
• Fortune, which launched a US ranking in 2021 to fill the gap left by lists that have shut down; and
• Poets & Quants, which, rather than running its own full-time MBA ranking, publishes a composite that aggregates several of the other lists. 

Popular opinion is that these lesser-known lists don’t carry the same weight as the first three in US admissions conversations, but we wanted to mention them for a well-rounded perspective.

Wait, Why Are There So Few Ranking Systems?

The list of major rankings used to be longer. Here’s what happened:

The Economist killed its MBA ranking in 2022. The magazine called it a commercial decision, but it followed years of criticism and school boycotts, and a final edition so volatile that nine schools moved 30 or more positions in a single year. A 30-spot move in twelve months indicates that the list may have been measuring its own methodology more than it was measuring the quality of the schools.

Forbes hasn’t published an MBA ranking since 2019. Its list was biennial and built around return on investment, which differentiated it from the other ranking systems. No MBA ranking system currently ranks programs primarily on whether the degree pays for itself.

How Each Ranking Is Built

Here’s the short version of how each ranking is built.

US News & World Report

US News covers US programs only and splits its formula into three buckets: career outcomes, quality assessment, and student selectivity. Career outcomes carries the most weight and covers employment rates and starting compensation. Quality assessment is entirely survey-based, split between ratings from business school deans and ratings from corporate recruiters. Student selectivity covers median GMAT and GRE® scores, median undergraduate GPA, and acceptance rate.

The test-score component is where US News has made its most consequential changes, including a switch from mean to median scores, and a specific method for reconciling scores from the current GMAT against the older version of the exam. To learn more about the specifics of the factors that build the US News list and how to interpret them, visit US News MBA Rankings, Explained.

The Financial Times

The FT ranks globally rather than nationally, so at first glance, it’ll look vastly different from other rankings. It runs seven separate rankings covering MBA, EMBA, Online MBA, Masters in Finance, Masters in Management, Executive Education, and European business schools.

To be eligible, a school needs AACSB or EQUIS accreditation or affiliation, and a first graduating class at least three years before publication. That last condition exists because of how the FT gathers its central data: it surveys graduates who finished their program exactly three years earlier. Salary and salary growth for that cohort are weighed the highest in this ranking system.

The most glaring weakness in the Financial Times’ ranking system is that alumni response rates decide whether a school appears at all. A school whose graduates don’t fill in the survey can be left off the list entirely, which, in our opinion, isn’t a great reason to be left off a list. For more on how the Financial Times’ list works, visit Financial Times MBA Rankings, Explained.

Bloomberg Businessweek

Businessweek is the most survey-driven of the three rankings. It asks graduating students, recent alumni, and recruiting companies a series of questions. It then builds five indexes from the answers: compensation, learning, networking, entrepreneurship, and inclusion, the last of which applies to US schools only.

The unusual thing about Bloomberg is that the weights aren’t fixed. Bloomberg recalculates how much each index counts every year based on which factors respondents say matter most to them. Compensation is the only index with hard data underneath it, and even there the reported employment and salary figures account for just over half the index score.

To learn the ins and outs of how this ranking system works, visit Bloomberg Businessweek MBA Rankings, Explained.

Take MBA Rankings With a Grain of Salt

Now that you have a basic understanding of how each list is created, it’s probably pretty evident why they contradict each other so much. 

Take US News – it surveys deans and corporate recruiters about whether a school is good, but doesn’t actually ask anyone who attended these programs about their opinion. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Bloomberg leans almost entirely on surveys, which can be an unreliable data source too.

A list built mostly on career outcomes and selectivity will reward schools with strong on-campus recruiting. A list built mostly on alumni surveys rewards schools that nag their past students to finish their surveys.

Each of these ranking systems is asking a different question, and thus getting different answers. This is why you end up with results that are all over the place – broad tiers hold up reasonably well across lists, but precise positions don’t hold up at all. We go into further detail about what a top 10 MBA actually means.

Rankings for Part-Time and Executive MBA Programs

If you’re looking at a part-time or executive program, the full-time rankings won’t help you, and the rankings that do cover your format work differently.

US News publishes a separate part-time MBA ranking with its own methodology, built on a much thinner data set than the full-time list. Executive MBA programs are covered by an even smaller group of publications, and the coverage is patchy enough that plenty of strong programs simply don’t appear anywhere.

Both formats deserve their own explanation, because the methodologies aren’t just scaled-down versions of the full-time formula. Read more about how part-time MBA rankings work, and how executive MBA rankings work.

How to Actually Use MBA Rankings

Use the rankings to build a rough tier structure, and then don’t think too hard about them. They’re reasonably good at telling you which schools sit in the general neighborhood of “highly selective with strong recruiting.” They’re absolutely terrible at telling you whether the 9th school is better than the 15th school.

Once you have your rough tiers, go look at the underlying data that made up those rankings in the first place, instead of the published summary of it. Every school publishes an employment report showing where its graduates actually went, by industry, by function, and by region. Reach out to alumni at your target schools about their journey and how the school helped facilitate it.

Most of the time, MBA rankings are (partially) BS, but they can be a helpful datapoint on your journey to business school.

For a broader look at what’s shifting in the MBA landscape right now, see our breakdown of recent MBA trends.