MBA School Rankings

When it comes to MBA school rankings, your options are plentiful.

With so many rankings out there, it can be confusing as to which rankings, if any, are useful in your MBA search.

Let's put things in perspective - rankings are provided by pubications such as magazines or newspapers.

For example, Business Week and US News & World Report have provided MBA rankings since 1988 and 1987 respectively.

Publications like Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and many others have provided various MBA rankings as well.

There is no doubt that providing rankings of business schools and MBA programs helps promote these ranking publications. However, rankings can be useful depending on the information you are after. Typically, there are four general categories of rankings as detailed below...

"Top" MBA Rankings - Busisness Week, US News, and Financial Times all provide "top" or "best" MBA rankings. This category of rankings is most popular and what people usually refer to when they talk about rankings. There is a subtle but important point to make here...top MBA rankings only include a business school's full-time MBA, regardless of how the ranking is labeled. However, it is assumed that any school with a top full-time MBA will also provide a top MBA of any other program type.

Rankings by Program Type - Business Week, US News, and Financial Times also rank "other" MBA program types...namely part-time and/or executive programs. As these types of programs have gained popularity and respect, publications have dedicated special rankings to them. Again, most of the schools ranked as "top" MBAs also show up in these rankings if they have part-time or executive programs. It should be noted that there really are no comparable distance MBA rankings.

Rankings by Specialty - US News and Business Week provide rankings based on the specialization of the MBA...such as accounting, marketing, management, finance, etc. This category also a sort of "catch-all" category. It covers all other rankings such as Forbes' MBA return on investment (ROI) rankings and the Wall Street Journal's Recruiter's Scorecard rankings. It also covers the vast number of publications that have ranked MBA programs throughout the years. Publications in certain industries seem to like ranking MBA programs within their industry. Some examples include Computerworld's best "techno" MBA rankings or Success Magazine's best entrepreneurial MBA rankings.

There needs to be a word here about methodologies of rankings. The methodoly refers to how the ranking was conducted and what information was used to determine the ranking. Even comparable rankings use different methodologies. So it is important to understand how the rankings were derived.

It is also helpful to understand the key details of the ranking...the total number being ranked (ex: top 30 vs. top 100), the location of the programs (ex: U.S. MBA vs Global MBA), how often the ranking takes place (ex: every year vs. every two years), etc.

MBA school rankings can be helpful if they assist you with your MBA pursuit. The best advice is to only follow those rankings that apply to your situation. If not applicable, don't even worry about the rankings.