Initially, the myriad of choices in the business school arena globally is overwhelming and could seem intimidating if you don’t have a plan of how to optimise your research. Thankfully, there are a number of respected and prominent rankings out there that help candidates evaluate various schools against a wide range of criteria including class size, course length, average GMAT, post-graduation remuneration and percentage of salary increase, to name but a few.
The business schools rankings are useful for everyone wanting to see where particular schools and programmes are positioned in a global list of ranked institutions. Additionally, even though the schools’ positions in the rankings indicate a programme’s overall performance (in terms of how graduates’ careers go post-graduation, how their salaries are impacted, whether they have international professional exposure and so on), some of the rankings also show information about percentages of female students in the various programmes, percentage of international faculty staff and so on – all features that are quite important for many prospective MBA students.
However, the rankings out there are numerous and candidates often find themselves confused, wondering which ones to look at and which are the most trustworthy and objective.
Some of the most internationally respected and popular rankings are the ones published by the Financial Times, the Economist, the Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. There are, of course, a number of other rankings that various independent organisations publish annually, but the aforementioned ones have gained international respect and recognition.
BusinessBecause, a network for the B-School world, gives its users a tool which enables them to compare business school rankings and data about full-time MBA programmes from the Financial Times, the Economist and Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Stay tuned for our series of short articles with tips and advice about what you should bear in mind when using some of the most popular international rankings for business schools.
The next article in the series will give you some details about the various rankings published every year by Financial Times: when each is available to the public, what the criteria for including schools in the rankings are and some other interesting and useful related facts.
Further on, you can check our website for the following article of the series, where we will discuss the nuts and bolts of the rankings published by the Economist, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and the U.S. News & World Report.
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