The Financial Times released its 2008 Global MBA rankings today, with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business claiming the number one spot for the fourth year in a row. Wharton’s company at the top remained relatively unchanged – Columbia, Stanford, Harvard and the London Business School (LBS) again comprised the top five ranked programs. Notably, LBS shot up from fifth to second this year – assuming the highest rank ever for a European business school – due in great part to the growth of London as a world economic center.
“As London has grown as a world financial centre, so has the popularity of British business schools, with students eager to work in the U.K. on graduation,” reported the FT in its analysis of this year’s ranking. Indeed, as we reported last week, LBS students overwhelmingly choose to remain in London upon graduation. Of last year’s graduating class, almost 70 percent took their first job in London last year, even though fewer than 10 percent of the students were British.
The rankings help make clear the ways in which the success of business schools is closely linked to the current business environment, according to the FT analysis. In addition to a rise in popularity of British schools, this year’s rankings also bear out the recent surge of world-class business schools in Asia, particularly China.
“The rise in volume and quality of Asian business schools is also economically linked,” Arnoud De Meyer, director of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, told the FT. “This is for a very simple reason: the demand for business schools is correlated with [the size of] GDP,” he continued.
U.S. schools, meanwhile, are being impacted by the weak dollar – though the impact is felt in different ways by different students. For non-U.S. students, the weak dollar means that jobs in the U.S. no longer carry an expected salary premium. But at the same time, tuition to U.S. programs is now also effectively cheaper.
U.S. schools continue to best their European counterparts where funding is concerned as well, the FT reports. Healthy endowments at U.S. schools help attract both faculty and students. Lisa Giannangeli, director of marketing for MBA admissions at Stanford, told the FT that 72 percent of students in this year’s class received some form of financial aid. “We paid over $7 million in grants and research assistantships,” she said.
Attention to academic research output and alumni satisfaction also differentiates U.S. schools from their European counterparts, according to the FT report. “We haven’t gone nearly as far as many U.S. schools,” says Michael Luger, director of Manchester Business School in the United Kingdom and a former academic at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School. European school will continue to increase their focus on alumni, he predicts.
But as European schools seem to be attempting to emulate U.S. schools in these areas, U.S. schools meanwhile are looking to European programs for guidance on curriculum development and teaching methods, the FT continued. Specifically, several top schools – including Yale, Stanford and Columbia – have reshaped their programs to include more teamwork and overseas projects.
Interestingly, the FT analysis points to U.S. schools’ accepting greater numbers of recent undergraduates into MBA programs as another major point differentiating them from their European counterparts. In another post last week, we took a look at this relatively recent trend in the U.S. According to the FT, the ability to enter an MBA program in the U.S. without prior related work experience could prove particularly attractive in the future to European career changers.
For as much as current economic conditions may affect European and U.S. schools differently, there are also ways in which the overall economic climate may impact business schools more universally. More on that in tomorrow’s post…
