The Financial Times has released its global rankings of the best MBA programs and has considerably shuffled the deck. Several top-ranked programs fell several notches, while others rose considerably. For the first time since 2011, Wharton has returned to its status as #1 in FT’s list.
Other programs that made giant strides in the rankings include Columbia Business School (ranked 8th in 2020), and Kellogg (Northwestern), now #5 (11th place in 2020). One reason for such huge fluctuations was that five of the top U.S. programs (Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, MIT, and Columbia) were not listed at all last year at all, skewing that year’s results.
Other highly rated programs that suffered serious tumbles in the rankings include London Business School, Tuck (Dartmouth), and UVA Darden. In fact, 69 of the 91 schools ranked fell in the rankings, many of them by double digits.
Compared with last year, many of these schools’ rankings looked like riders on a roller coaster, with some plunging far below and others rising by as much as 20 points to unprecedented heights.
As we have cautioned before, it’s vital to keep these rankings in perspective. They are based on many variables that have little or nothing to do with the quality of the curricula per se.
| 2022 Rank | School | 2021 Rank | Y-O-Y Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | UPenn Wharton | N/A | N/A |
| 2 | Columbia | N/A | N/A |
| 3 | INSEAD | 1 | -2 |
| 3 | Harvard | N/A | N/A |
| 5 | Northwestern Kellogg | 6 | -1 |
| 6 | Stanford GSB | N/A | N/A |
| 7 | Chicago Booth | 3 | -4 |
| 8 | London Business School | 2 | -6 |
| 9 | Yale SOM | 4 | -5 |
| 10 | IESE | 4 | -6 |
| 11 | HEC Paris | 7 | -4 |
| 11 | MIT Sloan | N/A | N/A |
| 13 | SDA Bocconi SOM | 12 | -1 |
| 14 | NYU Stern | 13 | -1 |
| 14 | UC-Berkeley Haas | N/A | N/A |
| 16 | CEIBS | 7 | -9 |
| 17 | Cornell Johnson | 15 | -2 |
| 18 | Dartmouth Tuck | 10 | -8 |
| 19 | Duke Fuqua | 9 | -10 |
| 20 | UVA Darden | 11 | -9 |
| 21 | Nat’l Univ. of Singapore | 14 | -7 |
| 22 | Cambridge Judge | 16 | -6 |
| 23 | CMU Tepper | 27 | +4 |
| 24 | Michigan Ross | 21 | -3 |
| 25 | USC Marshall | 24 | -1 |
| 26 | UCLA Anderson | N/A | N/A |
| 27 | Georgetown McDonough | 17 | -10 |
| 28 | IMD | 19 | -9 |
| 29 | WU Olin | 25 | -4 |
| 30 | UW Foster | 28 | -2 |
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By Judy Gruen, former Accepted admissions consultant. Judy holds a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University and is the co-author of Accepted’s first full-length book, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools. Want an admissions expert help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!
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