America rules the roost

Relax, most employers of MBA don't track the various annual ratings religiously. The private equity fund I work for is likely going back to the same three business schools for on-campus recruitment in the foreseeable future.

The funny thing is: our bosses generally don't have MBA degrees from a top school; actually, some of them only completed their undergraduate study at medicore institutions and have no MBA. However, it order to raise the fund's profile in the eyes of investors, (or to cover their own inadequacy), the firm is insisting on recruiting from only top MBA schools in the past few years.

I am so glad my alma mater is rated so highly by the Economist. I usually don't find it ranked higher than Harvard elsewhere.

Rankings are meant for students -- and for several wise employers to decide where NOT to recruit good managers from, because these B-Schools will have students whose salary expectations are sky-high for no reason other than the fact that someone has ranked them high.

Chicago? Dartmouth? York?? Get real, all this says is you don't know what you are talking about!

Why isn't Ryerson University Included in your list? It is Canada's largest undergraduate business management school.

My MBA is from your #10 ranked school but I'm much prouder of my four years in undergrad business studies at Ryerson. I felt my education there was more relevant to the real world.

I don't think much of MBA. Consider, MBA's are driving the air lines (into the ground) running the banks (into the ground) and driving the economy (into the ground) we need some new schools of thought not more MBAs

@QuillWizard MBAs run most of the private industry - firms that are doing badly AND firms that are doing well. Why complain about them now when the economy takes a down turn? Consider this. Almost all bad surgeries are performed by surgeons. May be we should shut down Medical schools too? :)

Getting back to the topic of rankings, I think people like to see rankings - which football team is the best, which person is the richest, etc. So, here you have a ranking of MBA schools. Doesn't mean much. Of course, my school topped the list so I get some bragging rights ... for next 12 months.

America also has the highest bankruptcies what with leveraged buyouts, hedge funding, financial swapping of thin air and derivative spin-offs that managed banks around the world to go bust resulting in the mother of all financial meltdown. A few schools of hard knocks now would come in handy. There are too many business schools and law schools around and not enough science and engineering ones.

ssyy could you please name the three business schools your company recruits from? Just because I am planning to work in private equity.
Thank you!

A lot of change in these lists will be driven by what is going on in developing markets like India. The growth and maturity of this business school market will likely change the landscape in significant ways, but there are also significant quality issues that schools there must address.

I have recently blogged about this in Business Week.

http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/sep2010/ca2010093_520557.htm

@PeaceOfMind - When you wrote "I think people like to see rankings" I think you meant "I think Americans like to see rankings".

"Insiders at Bloomberg Businessweek joke that the magazine’s ranking of MBA courses is its “swimsuit edition”: like the issues of Sports Illustrated with scantily-clad women on the cover, it sells well."

Haha they got this right!
Only difference would be that the magazines with MBA rankings will be for unisex.

OK, let's break it down.

Top Three Schools:
- Harvard
- Stanford
- somebody else

[Of course, I just pulled these rankings out of thin air, a process no less rigorous or accurate than that employed by some rookie staffer at the Economist.]

Chicago, Penn, MIT tend to have much more academically sophisticated academic programs than those listed schools.

And state schools are preferred by recruiters that want well-trained graduates that are grateful for their jobs and work hard for their employers.

But Harvard produces ludicrously aggressive and self-confident graduates prepared to bite the ass off of any sentient being that may wander in their way to inexorable personal advancement - that may not work in some sectors, but it's a pretty effective strategy on Wall Street.

And Stanford seems to attract really, really bright/interesting people that succeed by being productive while being mostly quite nice.

P.S. Since I went to HBS (I was later informed that my existence there was the result of an uncharacteristic "admissions error"), I am more than willing to pontificate on all this stuff with zero diligence on my part and an unshakeable belief in the absolute truth of whatever it was that I just wrote. Deal...

While women now make up almost 60 percent of the undergraduate population in America they make up less than 38 percent of MBA programs and many of the so-called elite finance programs have an even smaller percentage. While women do very well in India the opposite is true in America. According to Peterson (2010) Fidelity International in India was led by a woman as well as the country’s second-biggest bank, Icici Bank, and its third-largest, Axis Bank. Women also headed investment banking operations at Kotak Mahindra and JPMorgan Chase and the equities division of Icici and half of the deputy governors at the Reserve Bank of India are women. Why are American corporation’s bastions of white male dominance? They have created a culture of exclusion based on aggressive, golf clubbing, beer drinking, bar hopping, machismo. Women are not mentored and they are strongly devalued by their male counterparts and undermined. In America women who behave like the typical macho male at work they are called bitches, if they display characteristics typically stereotyped as female they are called weak. Many have blamed this macho, risk taking, boy’s club mentality as largely responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown. This culture needs to change. We must change the type of culture where a woman who makes it to the executive suite, outnumbered by macho, competitive males is brutalized and sent packing. The same situation exists in our most enlightened institutions, our universities. While we see significant changes in the numbers of women obtaining doctorate degrees men still occupy overwhelming majority of academic position at American universities. The doctorate was the last holdout for men among university degrees but in 2009 for the first time 28,962 degrees went to women and 28,496 went to men.

I think it's strange that The Economist thinks it's "sad" that men outnumber women among MBA students while not being concerned at all about women outnumbering men at universities in general.

Why is it "sad" that men outnumber women in MBAs? What matters is not the MBA, but success in the work place. Being successful without a MBA is surely better than spending $100,000 on a MBA and be equally or even less successful. The ranking really should measure success in the workplace instead of focusing on academic achievements.

Enough rankings already. We're all pink inside and we all use toilets the same way.

If a student wants to make money in the dynamic future economy then they will need to think innovatively verses becoming just another MBA lemming. Getting a degree in entrepreneurial studies from Babson or Stanford is much more valuable to the student, and the economy as a whole, than becoming another generic finance or marketing type.

The reason fewer woman get MBAs is they get sucked in by liberal artsy graduate programs. For them it's about an emotionally fulfilling life or life balance verses chasing the almighty dollar. Universities perpetuate this by marketing idealistic degree programs in domains where it is almost impossible to make money.

@ssyy said:

"The funny thing is: our bosses generally don't have MBA degrees from a top school; actually, some of them only completed their undergraduate study at medicore institutions and have no MBA."

Your statement provides anecdotal evidence for the following article:

Do grades really matter?

A growing body of evidence suggests grades don't predict success -- C+ students are the ones who end up running the world

http://www.macleans.ca/education/postsecondary/article.jsp?content=20070...

Regarding the value of the MBA degree to society and businesses. I have been asserting the wrongheadedness of the very idea of an MBA for a quarter century, long before we suffered this latest malady of the MBA disease. To assert that management is management, no matter the business, is just plain silly. To be successful, and contribute positively to the economy, a business must be run by someone that knows both management and the business being managed. All outward signs are that the current MBA programs merely teach the students a Machiavellian approach to feathering their own nests. The price of which society as a whole must bear.

Hi One should weight accordingly...how many of these MBA grads were in management at all of these institutions that were hammered during the world financial collape and how many were at the banks and investment banks trading and selling those products involved? I think we would lose a few out of the top 20 (at least from the US)..