Business School Rankings by Industry – Top MBA Programs in Finance for 2015

By Paul Lanzillotti, Amerasia Consulting Group

Today's blog post is going to be the first in a series that covers business school rankings. More specifically, it's Amerasia's attempt at ranking top MBA programs by industry and based on publicly available data. Our motivation for doing this is quite simple - business school rankings differ quite drastically from publication to publication. US News seems to be the most consistent and widely followed. After Businessweek ranked Fuqua at number one, they decided to change their methodology. Whether the two are correlated is up for debate. John Byrne over at "Poets and Quants" covered the change quite extensively here.

Regardless, we've never felt completely comfortable with the rankings because (to our knowledge) the raw data that drives the rankings has never been fully disclosed. Yes, we do know that the methodology (ranking model) has been discussed on relevant websites, but it's a cursory explanation of the process in our opinion. Also our opinion - that the process is still very much a black box. So we decided to start over and see what we could come up with. Most importantly we started with the very numbers that the school's career centers are reporting via their respective employment reporting.

Our opinion is that recruiting (i.e. who's hiring) drives most programs "investment" decisions - in students, faculty, courses, experiential initiatives, alumni outreach, etc. So to know to what a specific MBA program is really all about, you need to see the end result. In other words, what industries are hiring MBA graduates and from what schools?

Now before we get into the numbers, a few words of caution. What we have done is our first attempt at a numerically based ranking and its not perfect. It's based on our interpretation of the numbers put forth by top business schools. Let us explain. Most MBA career centers report employment numbers according to the categories that we use in our rankings. Some schools break "industry" categories into further sub-categories. Other programs - i.e. Michigan Ross - roll up their industry categories under more general headers like "manufacturing". So you could be a "marketing" professional but be within the manufacturing industry. To be forthright, it's a little confusing. (This is why we have decided to exclude Michigan Ross from some categories until we gather a little more insight into their self-reported numbers.)

None-the-less, we have tried to make sense of it all and to do this we did combine some categories in order to get an apples-to-apples comparison across schools. Clear as mud? That being said, we welcome any constructive feedback you may have. Email us at MBA@amerasiaconsulting.com.

Top MBA Programs in Finance (2015)

AKA THE RANKING OF BUSINESS SCHOOL PROGRAMS BY PERCENTAGE OF GRADUATES ENTERING THE FINANCE INDUSTRY IN 2014.

Our first ranking is "Finance" and Chicago Booth comes out on top.