Bloomberg Businessweek MBA Rankings, Explained

Bloomberg Businessweek ranks MBA programs almost entirely on surveys. Graduating students, alumni several years out, and companies that recruit MBAs answer questions about their programs, and those answers feed five indexes: compensation, learning, networking, entrepreneurship, and inclusion. The unusual part is that the weights aren’t fixed. Bloomberg recalculates how much each index counts every year, based on what matters most to respondents.

That one design choice makes this ranking behave differently from every other list, and it’s the thing to understand before you read anything into a school’s position. For how this list fits alongside the others, start with our rankings overview.

How Bloomberg Businessweek Builds Its Ranking

Bloomberg ranked 102 business schools worldwide in its most recent edition. Programs can be based anywhere, but classes have to be taught primarily in English.

The following three groups are surveyed to establish the rankings:

• Recent graduates
• Alumni who graduated 6 to 9 years ago
• Employers who recruited MBA graduates for full-time roles in the past two years

There are minimum response-rate thresholds scaled to the size of each school’s graduating and alumni classes. Schools that missed them were cut. Bloomberg notes that two schools were kept despite falling just short on one of the three surveys.

The Five Indexes

Everything feeds into five indexes. Four apply to all schools; inclusion applies to US schools only.

Learning covers instruction: how well the curriculum maps onto real business situations, mentoring and support from faculty, class size, and collaboration.

Networking covers the network the school offers you: classmates, alumni interaction, the career services office, alumni-to-alumni engagement, and how recruiters rate the school’s brand.

Entrepreneurship asks students and alumni whether the school treats starting a business as seriously as any other career path, and asks recruiters whether graduates show real entrepreneurial drive.

Compensation is the only index with hard data underneath it. More on that below.

Inclusion is based on the demographics of the first-year class. More on that later, too.

The Weights Are Recalculated Every Year

Every respondent, in all three groups, is asked to rank the five factors that matter most to them, choosing from a list of nine to 13 options. Each factor maps to one of the five indexes. A top-ranked factor earns five points, second place earns four, and so on down. Bloomberg then adjusts the totals twice: once for which stakeholder group the respondent is in, and once because the indexes aren’t equally represented in the list of options.

The resulting point totals become the index weights. Which means the formula is rebuilt annually out of whatever this year’s respondents happened to care about.

For the most recent edition:

How Schools Get Scored

Respondents rate their school on a seven-point agreement scale, where seven is complete agreement and one is complete disagreement. They rate the factors they picked as most important, then answer a common set of statements that everyone sees regardless of what they picked.

For learning, networking, and entrepreneurship, these surveys form the entire score.

Compensation is different. Alongside the survey questions, Bloomberg collects employment and compensation data from schools, and that hard data accounts for 52.5% of the compensation index. The survey portion is the remaining 47.5%.

Non-US salaries are converted to US dollars at the average exchange rate for the year ending June 30, 2025. They are not adjusted for purchasing power.

Finally, each index score gets rescaled from its 1-to-7 raw value onto a 0-to-100 scale, then weighted per the table above.

Where the Methodology Breaks Down

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering why any of this matters, which is a very fair question. The reason to understand how a ranking works is to figure out where it’s weak, and where it’s weak is where you need to do your own homework, especially if you’re making a six-figure decision about which program to attend.

I have more sympathy for this ranking than you might expect. Asking the people who actually attended a program what it was like is a defensible thing to do, and it captures things no employment report can. But there are four places where I’d want you to slow down.

Moving Weights Make Year-Over-Year Comparison Close to Meaningless

If the weights are rebuilt every year from fresh survey responses, then a school’s position this year and its position last year were produced by two different formulas.

Say networking climbs a few points because this year’s respondents ranked it higher. Every school that surveys well on networking rises, but every school that doesn’t, falls. For what it’s worth, Bloomberg is transparent about this, but it does mean that “Kellogg moved up four spots” means even less than it seems to at first glance.

The Alumni You’re Hearing From Graduated Six to Nine Years Ago

The alumni survey covers people who finished six to nine years ago. That’s absolutely the right call if you want to know whether a degree paid off over time. It’s the wrong call if you want to know what a program is like now. Curricula change, deans change, entire industries that a school placed into change. If you’re reading a networking or learning score, you’re reading, in large part, an assessment of a program that stopped existing in that form several years ago.

Response Thresholds Decide Who Appears

Schools that don’t clear Bloomberg’s minimum survey response rates get cut from the ranking entirely.

That’s a reasonable data-quality rule, and it’s more transparent than most. It also means a school’s spot on this list partly reflects how well its administration mobilized students and alumni to fill out a form. A school with a disengaged alumni base can vanish without anything being wrong with the education.

International Salaries Aren’t Adjusted for What Money Buys

Bloomberg converts non-US salaries at a single average exchange rate and explicitly does not adjust for purchasing power parity.

Compensation is the heaviest index in the formula. So a graduate earning the equivalent of $95,000 somewhere with a low cost of living scores below a graduate earning $120,000 in an expensive city, even if the first person is materially better off. If you’re comparing programs across countries, make sure to keep this little tidbit in mind.

How to Best Use the Bloomberg Ranking

Now that you know how it works and its pitfalls, here’s our advice on how you should read the rankings when you’re making decisions on what business school to attend:

• Read the indexes, not the overall number. The overall rank is a muddle of five indexes, which themselves are at the mercy of this year’s survey mood. The individual index scores are more stable and more informative. If you care about entrepreneurship, read the entrepreneurship index. If you care about network, read the networking one. You’ll basically be getting alumni and recruiter feedback about a school en masse this way.

• Remember that the compensation index is the sturdiest thing here. It’s the only one with more than half its weight in hard data, not just surveys.

• Remember that this ranking is mostly a measure of satisfaction. Treat learning, networking, and entrepreneurship as what they are: satisfaction scores from people who attended this school. That’s incredibly valuable information, but it’s also not all the information you need. It’s not a full measurement of a program’s quality, in the way that the number’s presentation implies. 

And if you want the broader argument about how much any ranking deserves to steer your decisions, we’ve made that argument, at length, here.