FT 2007 Rankings

Wait im confused... the list in teh first post doesnt match the list here at all.

https://rankings.ft.com/rankings/mba/rankings.html

Where is the first list coming from?

Ach, indeed they were. I shall discount that then (for some reason I remembered them being about 13).

Glad it is linkable (I have an FT login, so don't really know what appears and what doesn't). Saves me having to go ferretting through the paper.

kwam - what do you mean "banking" rank? This is based on a huge survey of alumni, so no banking bias at all (also, the FT is the generic business paper really).

First list is exactly the FT list for 2007. For some reason they have put Harvard above Stanford in print, and the other way around online.

Second list is their "List of Lists" where they compiled several lists. I used US only as Stanford appears higher in the Global list-of-lists than in the US, which makes no sense at all.

What is the URL to the second list?

OK - the article link is https://www.ft.com/cms/s/3ed8a91e-ad5a-11db-8709-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=991cbd66-9258-11da-977b-0000779e2340.html

However. They don't show you the table.

Interesting stuff.

I did something similar once...

https://www.gmatclub.com/phpbb/viewtopic ... bined+rank

Doing the same thing with the data they use (which seems to omit US News and World Report) you get:

Tuck 33
Wharton 32
GSB 32
Stanford 27
Columbia 26
HBS 25
Kellogg 21
Ross 20
UC Berkley 12

I only used the us ranks, i think they wieghted if they showed up in the global ones too. Probably a better approach. Either way, its interesting.

I asked that because in FT ranking, always Wharton, Columbia, Chicago, NYU and LBS have been on TOP 10, correct if I'm wrong: all Finance Powerhouses (I am not saying that they are only good in finance).


rhyme, I've made something similar to what you did for the rankings, making an average ranking with WSJ (04 and 05), BW (from 88 to 06), Economist (05 and 06), FT (04 to 07), US News (06) and Forbes (06), and the result I got was:

Wharton
Kellogg
Harvard
Chicago
Stanford
Columbia
Tuck
Michigan
MIT
Duke
Darden
NYU
Cornell
UC Berkeley
UCLA


I am sorry I have not considered other schools, I made for the ones I am interested at.

When considering only the last 2 years the result is:
Chicago
Wharton
Kellogg
Stanford
Tuck
Harvard
Columbia
Michigan
MIT
UC Berkeley
NYU
Darden
Duke
UCLA
Cornell

What do you guys think?

kwam - I see where you are coming from but it is difficult to argue there is such a trend.

LBS is in there because of a Europe skew more than anything. They contact alumni to fill out surveys - I would bet most UK based alumni would be more interested in contributing to the FT than BW or whatever. LBS always shines high in the FT.

NYU is a funny one with the FT. The others are standard high performers. Wharton gets tradition on its side more than Finance, GSB will probably feel maligned with its ranking here. Stanford & Harvard are management and never rank at all for Finance.

What is more interesting are the uncharacteristic showings. Columbia is always low on alumni recommendations, which is weird. If you want value for money, Coppead in Brazil (62nd) is your school! Only non-US schools seem to rank high on International mobility, which maybe reflects on the motives of those outside the US persuing MBAs.

There is nothing in their first derivative data set that links to Finance - they will doubtless protect their algorithm to calculate the ranks (I know that the schools will have first seen this the same time as me. Well, maybe later, I was in early).

Maybe I will do a regression analysis on what data each table shows to get you the basis of their calculation (obviously lacking non-shown data).

I am sad, aren't I.

Why is everyone so obsessed with rankings ?

Mostly because its an easy way to compare schools. It's hard and fast. You can say "School X is ranked better than School Y". Same reason people fret over gmat scores: "Score X is better than score Y". There's little to no interpretation involved. Its the same reason when you ask someone for their profile they say "730 GMAT, 3.5 GPA, 6Y WE" because its all quantifiable and easily comparable. Thats not to say that someone should base a decision based on rank - but for the exact same reasons schools care about GMAT, applicants care about rank.

Can you really compare schools with these bogus rankings designed to sell magazines ? For examples, FT ranks all the brit schools above Kellogg which is #19. BW ranks Chicago and Michigan higher than Harvard and Stanford respectively.

The cluster system at GMATClub makes much more sense and gives people an intuitive sense of where schools stand.

I think there's a bug in your formula at the end - its not counting the right cells.. or I'm missing how you did it - its counting the blank cell (F's) in WSJ, not the 05's - and the 04's in BW, not the 06's, the 05s in eco, not hte 06s, and the 06s in FT not the 07s.

If you take the latest for all you'd get:

Wharton 4.00
Harvard 4.17
Chicago 4.83
Kellogg 5.33
Tuck 5.50
Stanford 5.50
Columbia 6.17
MIT 8.00
Michigan 8.67
UC Berkeley 9.17
NYU 10.83
UCLA 11.33
Duke 11.67
Darden 12.00
Cornell 12.83

And if you take the last two years -

Chicago 4.75
Wharton 4.88
Stanford 4.88
Tuck 5.25
Harvard 5.25
Kellogg 5.50
Columbia 6.00
MIT 8.13
Michigan 8.38
UC Berkeley 9.13
NYU 9.50
UCLA 11.38
Darden 11.88
Duke 12.13
Cornell 13.00

The thing that makes the most sense to me is the commonly accepted status that Havard and Stanford are the two best, followed by Wharton and Chicago, and then by Kellogg. Some people put Kellogg ahead of Chicago and next to Wharton.

In other words, within the ultra-elite top cluster:

1st: H/S
2nd: W/C
3rd: K

Sorry, I have not saved the spread sheet as the "last version"...
Note that I just put 15 schools from US and ranked them in the order they appeared in each rank...

When I asked the COO of the bank I work for (one of the top20 in the world, with an award winning Derivatives IB arm) about MBAs, I got a one line reply.

Go to a top ten school or don't bother going.

When people of that power, in this kind of institution think like that, then if I don't care about rankings then I am wasting my time and money.

You can argue this is self perpetuating all you like, and I would agree. But it is the game. If you want to head into a different industry than me, or want to start your own company, this may not be quite so strongly the case.

There may be better systems, but the simple truth is that my future boss will be looking at the FT, WSJ or BusinessWeek.

As someone else once said in some article I read somewhere, "It's a pre screened applicant pool."