FT MBA Rankings 2026: Surprises, Rants, and What it Means for You!
Maria |
February 17, 2026

The 2026 Financial Times Global MBA Rankings Are Here – And There’s a LOT to Unpack

Maria | February 2026 | Business School News

The Financial Times just dropped its 2026 Global MBA Rankings, and… wow. If you’ve been following the MBA rankings world at all, you know that each year the FT ranking seems to bring more drama than the last. But this year? This year is wild.

In a hurry? The key take-aways are that international programs (especially in Asia) are on the rise; however, my BIGGEST take-away for you is that rankings can be an interesting starting point for your research, but dig into the methodology (something I do a LOT of below!) and you’ll see that 1, the things they measure for might not be super-relevant to you and 2, the differences between programs can be marginal, so don’t place TOO MUCH STOCK into them!

Let’s dig in.

In This Post:

The Rankings Results:

My (Very Opinionated) Take on the Methodology:

What This Means for You:

The Big Headline: MIT Sloan Takes the #1 Spot

MIT Sloan has surged from #6 last year to #1 this year. That’s a huge jump, and honestly, it’s well-deserved — Sloan has been on a trajectory for a while now, and this feels like the culmination of years of strong career outcomes, salary data, and overall momentum. Their alumni are earning an average of $244,613 three years out, and they posted a 119% salary increase over pre-MBA pay. Not too shabby!

Meanwhile, Wharton — which held the #1 spot last year (and, let’s be real, has pretty much historically owned this ranking) — slipped to #3. Before anyone starts panicking: Wharton grads still earn the second-highest salaries in the entire ranking ($249,067), and the school’s three-year average rank is still #2. It’s Wharton. It’s going to be fine.

INSEAD grabbed #2, continuing its reign as the perennial top-ranked international school. It’s been bouncing around the top 5 for years and this is about as “INSEAD” a result as you can get.

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Wait — Where Are Stanford and Columbia?!

OK, so here’s the thing that will probably generate the most conversation (at least in the circles I run in): Stanford GSB, Columbia Business School, and SDA Bocconi are all NOT IN the FT ranking this year.

Stanford was conspicuously absent last year too, so at this point we might call that a trend. But Columbia — which was #2 in the entire ranking just last year! — has now vanished. HOWEVER, I don’t think this is a “fall from grace”. And then there’s Bocconi, which is perhaps the most eyebrow-raising absence of all — but more on that in a moment.

The reason these schools are missing? It comes down to alumni survey response rates. The FT requires a minimum of 20% of alumni to respond to their survey, and if a school doesn’t hit that threshold, they simply don’t get ranked. Period.

Now, the Bocconi thing is fascinating to me. If you’ve been following the FT rankings over the past several years, you’ll know that Bocconi has had a remarkably strong run — climbing from #29 five years ago all the way up to a tie for #3 in 2024. And look, Bocconi is a great school! But I’ll be honest: that trajectory always struck me as… aggressive, let’s say. There were a lot of raised eyebrows in the admissions world about whether Bocconi’s meteoric FT rise truly reflected a commensurate leap in program quality, or whether the school had simply gotten very, very good at playing the rankings game — optimizing the specific metrics the FT cares about (salary increases, international diversity, etc.). For a school that had apparently put that much effort into maximizing its FT performance to suddenly not have enough alumni responses to even be included? That is… quite something.

Does the absence of Stanford, Columbia, and Bocconi mean they aren’t “top” business schools? Of course not. (I mean, come on.) But it does highlight a real tension that has been building between some elite schools and the FT ranking methodology. There’s been a lot of grumbling in the background about the FT’s increasing weight on things like ESG teaching, carbon footprint, and diversity metrics — factors where US schools in particular have been losing ground, especially given the current political climate around DEI and ESG in the United States. That is, it seems as though the London-based FT has added in metrics that just so happen to favor European schools, vs. “are these metrics truly ones that matter?”

I’ll say this diplomatically: some schools may have decided that participating in the FT ranking was no longer in their strategic interest. And the alumni survey response rate issue may be… well, let’s call it a convenient threshold to fall below.

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The M7: A Mixed Bag

For those of you obsessing over the “M7” — and I know you are! — here’s how the five M7 schools that are in the ranking performed:

  • MIT Sloan: #1 (up from #6) 🎉
  • Wharton: #3 (down from #1)
  • Harvard: #10 (up from #13 — haters gonna hate)
  • Kellogg: #11 (down from #10)
  • Booth: #20 (down from #17 — and down from #10 in 2024! Huh?)
  • Stanford and Columbia: as mentioned above, not here

So if you’re an M7 purist, you’re looking at a situation where only ONE of the M7 is in the FT’s top 5 this year. That is… unprecedented. And it’s going to be very interesting to see whether this motivates any of these schools to re-engage with the FT next year, or whether the “we don’t need the FT” stance becomes more entrenched.

(For what it’s worth, Harvard still boasts the #1 career progress rank in the entire survey. And HBS grads earn the HIGHEST average salary of any school in the ranking: $261,196. HBS also has the 2nd-highest “yield” (percent of accepted students who enroll). So, you know, the sky isn’t falling.)

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European and Spanish Schools Are Having a MOMENT

You want to know who’s doing well? Europe. Like, really well.

INSEAD at #2. London Business School at #4 (up from #7). IESE at #4 (tied with LBS — and IESE has been in the top 5 for three straight years now). HEC Paris at #6. Esade at #7. That is FIVE European schools in the top 7. (See what I mean about that seeming just a bit suspicious?)

And the Spanish schools in particular — IESE and Esade — are on a tear. They’ve been climbing steadily for years, and their combination of strong salary increases (132% and 155% respectively!), international diversity, and a focus on ESG and sustainability is a perfect fit for the FT’s methodology.

If I were an internationally-minded MBA applicant right now — and especially if I were an international student who’s nervous about the US immigration situation (which, as we’ve discussed extensively on the podcast) — I would be looking at these European schools VERY seriously. And I’m not just saying that because I want to live in Spain 🙂

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Asia Is Rising — Especially India

OK, this might be the most under-the-radar story in this year’s ranking: Asian schools are surging.

CEIBS (China) is up to #8 — Tier I! Nanyang (Singapore) rocketed from #22 to #12. Indian School of Business jumped from #27 to #12 (tied with Nanyang!). Peking University: Guanghua went from #25 to #14.

But the real story here is India. I count NINE Indian schools in the top 100, and almost every single one of them went UP this year. IIM Ahmedabad (#27), IIM Bangalore (up 23 spots to #34!), IIM Calcutta, IIM Lucknow, IIM Indore, IIM Kozhikode — they’re ALL climbing. And ISB’s salary increase of 248% is the highest in the entire ranking. Two hundred and forty-eight percent!

(To put that in perspective: if you were earning $50,000 before your MBA, a 248% increase means you’re now earning $174,000. That is a life-changing return on investment, especially in the Indian context.)

This aligns with something we’ve been talking about on the Poets & Quants podcast for a while now: as the US becomes a riskier bet for international students (OPT uncertainty, immigration crackdowns, etc.), programs in Asia — especially India — are becoming increasingly attractive alternatives.

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The Biggest Risers and Fallers

A few schools that deserve a shout-out for big moves:

Biggest Climbers:

  • Cranfield (UK): Up 27 spots (#82 → #55)
  • Essec (France): Up 23 spots (#47 → #24)
  • IIM Bangalore (India): Up 23 spots (#57 → #34)
  • Cambridge Judge (UK): Up 18 spots (#35 → #17)
  • ISB (India): Up 15 spots (#27 → #12)

Biggest Drops:

  • Shanghai University of Finance and Economics: Down 21 spots (#15 → #36)
  • UCLA Anderson: Down 13 spots (#19 → #32)
  • UT Dallas Jindal: Down 14 spots (#54 → #68)
  • Dartmouth Tuck: Down 6 spots (#20 → #26)
  • Emory Goizueta: Down 11 spots (#45 → #56)

The Cambridge Judge rise is really notable — up 18 spots to #17, which is their best FT showing in years. And UCLA Anderson dropping 13 spots to #32 is going to sting, and seems unwarranted, just based on the career outcomes my clients have when they go there.

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OK But Can We Talk About the Methodology for a Second? Because the “Salary Increase” Metric Is Fundamentally Flawed.

I’m going to go on a bit of a rant here, so bear with me. (Or skip ahead to the “what does this mean for you” section, if you prefer. I won’t be offended.)

The FT’s methodology gives “Salary Percentage Increase” a weight of 16% — tied with “Weighted Salary” as the single most important metric in the entire ranking. Together, these two salary metrics account for 32% of a school’s total score. Essentially a third of the whole enchilada.

Now, the “weighted salary” part makes sense to me. Higher post-MBA salaries = good. Fine. No argument there. And viewing salary through the lens of Purchasing Power Parity is sometimes I’ve always thought was a great idea.

But “salary percentage increase“? At 16%? As one of the TWO most important things in the ranking?

Here’s the problem: this metric inherently penalizes the most elite programs — the very ones that attract the highest-caliber (and therefore highest-earning) candidates before they even start the MBA.

Let me show you why, with actual numbers from this year’s ranking:

A Harvard MBA grad is earning an average of $261,196 three years out — the highest salary in the entire ranking. But Harvard’s salary increase is “only” 105%. Why? Because if you back into the math, Harvard’s students were already earning roughly $127,000 before they even set foot in a classroom. Of course they were — these are people who were already successful enough to be competitive for admission to Harvard Business School! The admissions process practically guarantees that these are people who were already high-performers and high-earners!

Now compare that to, say, the Indian School of Business, which posted an eye-popping 248% salary increase — the highest in the entire ranking. ISB is a fantastic school, and I am NOT knocking it. But their students’ implied pre-MBA salary was roughly $58,000. Going from $58K to $201K is incredible and life-changing and a HUGE win for those graduates — but it’s a LOT easier to post a massive percentage increase when your starting point is lower.

And that’s the whole point: the percentage increase metric rewards programs that admit students with lower pre-MBA salaries, and it punishes programs that attract candidates who were already accomplished and well-compensated.

Look at the pattern:

  • Wharton grads earn $249K (second-highest in the ranking!) but their increase is 103%. Implied pre-MBA salary: ~$123K
  • Esade grads earn $205K but their increase is 155%. Implied pre-MBA salary: ~$80K
  • CEIBS grads earn $200K but their increase is 156%. Implied pre-MBA salary: ~$78K
  • Peking Guanghua grads earn $177K but their increase is 173%. Implied pre-MBA salary: ~$65K

So Wharton, despite producing grads who earn $44,000 more per year than Esade grads and $72,000 more per year than Peking Guanghua grads, actually gets dinged in the ranking because its percentage increase is lower. The school is literally being penalized for attracting top talent!

And I can tell you — while folks from many different pre-MBA backgrounds get in to HBS and other top programs, I routinely see applicants from e.g. Private Equity, Consulting, Entrepreneurship, even Big Law…. applying with total comp easily in the $200k+ range, sometimes even $500k or more!

Think about it this way: if a school were to hypothetically lower its admissions standards — and therefore start admitting people who were previously earning less — its “salary percentage increase” would go UP, and it would do BETTER in the FT ranking. Does that make sense to anyone? Is that really the incentive we want to create?

This is, in my humble (OK, not-so-humble) opinion, a significant flaw in the FT’s methodology. A percentage increase tells you something about the transformational ROI of a program for its students — and that IS valuable information — but when you weight it as the co-most-important single metric in the entire ranking, and equally to the actual dollar-amount salary, you’re essentially baking in a structural disadvantage for programs that attract already-successful people.

And you wonder why some elite US schools are less enthusiastic about participating in the FT ranking? Not sure I blame them?

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Is the FT Ranking… Biased Toward European Schools?

I’ll just come out and say it: the Financial Times is a UK-based publication, and five out of the top eight schools in this ranking are European. Is that… a coincidence?

Now, I want to be fair here. I’m not saying the FT is intentionally rigging the game. But when you look at how the methodology is constructed, it’s hard not to notice that several of the criteria structurally favor European (and other international) schools over American ones.

Let’s add it up. The FT dedicates roughly 15% of the total ranking weight to “international” metrics: international faculty (3%), international students (3%), international board members (1%), international mobility (5%), and international course experience (3%). On these metrics, European schools dominate. Look at the actual data:

INSEAD has 90% international faculty and 96% international students. LBS has 93% and 94%. HEC Paris has 71% and 95%. Meanwhile, Wharton is at 33% and 34%. Harvard is at 44% and 37%. Darden is at 32% and 41%. These aren’t small gaps — they’re chasms. And of course they are! American schools draw heavily from a domestic applicant pool of 330 million people (ok ok so not all of those people are eligible to apply for an MBA but my point is, we’ve got a lot of people!). A student body that is “only” 40% international isn’t a sign of insularity — it’s a reflection of the fact that the US itself is an enormous, already-diverse country.

Then add in ESG and carbon footprint criteria (roughly another 7% of the total weight), where European schools also tend to outperform — partly because ESG education is more embedded in European business culture, and partly because the current US political environment has made many American institutions actively back away from ESG branding. Booth’s ESG teaching rank is literally 100th out of 100. Cornell’s is 85th. Duke’s is 97th. These aren’t bad schools — they’re schools operating in a country where ESG has become politically toxic, and can have genuine negative impacts (e.g. pulled government funding).

So when you add it all up — roughly 22% of the entire FT ranking is built on criteria where European schools have a massive, structural, built-in advantage. That’s not nothing. That’s more than one-fifth of the formula.

Again, I’m not saying the FT is doing this maliciously, in a Bond-villain type way. International diversity and sustainability ARE things that matter, and it’s reasonable for a global ranking to measure them. But when a UK-based publication designs a methodology that happens to produce results where 5 of the top 8 schools are European… well, I think it’s worth pointing out the potential for some home-court advantage, let’s say.

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Does “Great Research” = “Great MBA Experience”? Not Necessarily.

And OK, while I’m grumbling about the methodology, let’s talk about the research rank, which accounts for 10% of the FT’s total score. This is based on the number of articles published by a school’s full-time faculty in selected academic journals.

On the PRO side: having world-class researchers on faculty CAN be a genuine asset. If you’re going to a top program and you have the chance to take a class from the leading thinker on competitive strategy, or behavioral finance, or entrepreneurship — that’s incredible. Access to faculty who are literally creating new knowledge in their field is one of the things that separates a top business school from a mediocre one. And sometimes these professors have valuable contacts in the companies they write their research on! I get it.

But here are the CONs, and they’re significant:

Good researchers are not always good teachers. We all know this from our own educational experiences — the brilliant professor who can barely string together a coherent lecture, or who seems annoyed that teaching is taking them away from their next journal article. Publishing papers in academic journals and being able to explain complex concepts to MBA students in an engaging way are two VERY different skill sets. A school can have a faculty full of prolific publishers and still deliver a mediocre classroom experience.

Even if the star researcher IS a great teacher, you might not actually get access to them. That famous professor’s course might be so oversubscribed that you can’t get a seat. Or they might be on sabbatical the year you’re on campus. Or they might primarily teach in the PhD program or the executive education program (where schools make the real $$$), not the full-time MBA. Or they might be perfectly lovely but booked solid and impossible to get a meeting with outside of class. The ranking rewards a school for having the researcher on its faculty roster — but that tells you nothing about whether you, the MBA student, will actually benefit from their presence.

And the data shows just how much this one metric can distort the overall picture. Chicago Booth is ranked #3 in research but only #20 overall — meaning Booth’s incredible academic firepower (anyone who’s studied finance knows how much foundational work has come out of Chicago) is being diluted by weaker scores on criteria like ESG and internationalism. Meanwhile, Esade is ranked #7 overall but #72 in research. ISB is #12 overall but #70 in research. HEC Paris is #6 overall but #41 in research. These are enormous gaps — and they suggest that research output and overall “MBA quality” (whatever that means) are not nearly as correlated as the 10% weighting implies.

I’m not saying research doesn’t matter. But if you’re an MBA applicant, I’d encourage you to ask yourself: Do I care more about a school’s publication record, or about the quality of teaching in the classroom? Because those are not the same thing, and the FT ranking conflates them.

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One More Thing: The Alumni Survey Has a Built-In “Rosy Glasses” Problem

Here’s something that nags at me every year with the FT ranking, and I think it deserves more attention: the entire ranking depends heavily on alumni voluntarily responding to a survey. The alumni survey accounts for roughly 56% of the total ranking weight. That is a LOT of faith to place in self-reported data from a self-selected group.

Think about this for a second. The FT surveys alumni three years after graduation and asks them about their salaries, career progress, and satisfaction. But who is most likely to respond to that survey?

If you graduated from a top MBA program and you’re now crushing it — great job title, great salary, feeling good about life — you’re probably pretty happy to fill out a survey from the Financial Times that asks you about your career. “Why yes, let me tell you about how well things are going!“

But what if you’re going through a rough patch? What if you got laid off six months ago and you’re still job-hunting? What if you took a pay cut to pursue a passion project that hasn’t panned out yet? What if you’re just feeling a little… embarrassed about where you are relative to your classmates? Are you going to eagerly fill out a survey that asks you to report your current salary and job title? Probably not.

This is a well-known phenomenon in survey research. It’s a combination of non-response bias (the people who don’t respond are systematically different from those who do) and social desirability bias (people tend to present themselves in the most favorable light). The result? The data almost certainly skews rosier than reality. The alumni who respond are disproportionately the ones who are doing well, which means the salary figures, the “aims achieved” percentages, the career progress scores — all of it is likely overstating the actual outcomes for the full graduating class.

And here’s the kicker: the FT requires a minimum 20% response rate for a school to be included in the ranking. That means up to 80% of alumni can simply not respond, and the school still gets ranked based on the 20% who did. If that 20% is disproportionately the success stories… well, you can see the problem.

I’m not saying the data is useless. But I AM saying that anyone reading these numbers should keep a healthy grain of salt handy. The salary figures and satisfaction scores you see in this ranking are not “the average outcome for all graduates.” They are “the average outcome for the graduates who felt good enough about their careers to tell the Financial Times about them.” Those are two very different things.

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So What Does This All Mean for YOU?

Look, I went to HBS — which is currently sitting at #10 in this ranking. You might think I’d be sad or discouraged about that. I am not. Not even a little bit.

I chose Harvard because I genuinely believed that the case method was the best pedagogy for me, personally, to learn from. I’m someone who learns by debating, by arguing through real-world scenarios, by being cold-called and forced to defend a position on the spot, and by having people call me out when my reasoning has holes in it. That’s how my brain works. Not everyone’s brain works that way! And that’s fine! But for me, it was the right fit.

I also liked that HBS has a large class size — roughly 900 students per class. Why? Because I had a niche career interest (media), and a bigger class meant a greater probability that I’d find more people who shared that interest. And guess what? I did. The connections I made at HBS in the media space were instrumental to my early post-MBA career.

Would a ranking have told me any of that? Nope.

And that brings me to my biggest piece of advice:

Rankings Are a Starting Point. They Are NOT the Finish Line.

Rankings can help you build an initial list of schools to research. That’s genuinely useful! But please, PLEASE do not treat the FT ranking (or US News, or Bloomberg, or any ranking) as the definitive, final-word arbiter of which program is “best” — and especially not which program is best for you.

Visit campuses. Sit in on a class. Talk to current students. Talk to alumni — ideally ones in the career path you’re interested in. If you can’t visit in person, at a minimum get on the phone or Zoom with people at the programs you’re considering. Every school has a different culture, a different energy, a different way of doing things. You will not get a feel for that from a spreadsheet.

The case method at HBS is a totally different learning experience from the lecture-heavy approach at some other top schools. The tight-knit, small-class feel of a Tuck or a Darden is a totally different social experience from a large urban program like Stern or Booth. Neither is “better” — they’re just different, and one of them is probably a better fit for you than the others.

And While We’re At It: These Rankings Are WAY Closer Than They Look

Here’s something that most people don’t realize when they’re staring at the ranking table: the actual differences between many of these schools on the underlying metrics are tiny.

People see a school at #9 and another at #16 and assume there must be a meaningful gap. But look at the actual data:

“Aims achieved” — the percentage of alumni who say the MBA helped them achieve their goals — ranges from 85% to 91% across the entire top 30. MIT Sloan (#1) is at 88%. Harvard (#10) is at 89%. Duke (#16) is at 90%. Booth (#20) is at 90%. The #20 school has a HIGHER “aims achieved” score than the #1 school! These differences are so small they’re practically rounding errors.

Weighted salaries tell a similar story in many cases. Kellogg (#11) comes in at $219,821. INSEAD (#2) is at $217,822. LBS (#4) is at $217,389. That’s a difference of roughly $2,000 per year between the #2 school and the #11 school. If you’re choosing between those programs based on a $2,000 salary difference, I’d gently suggest you’re focusing on the wrong things.

Or look at overall satisfaction: Harvard (#10) scores a 9.26. Darden (#19) scores a 9.27. Cornell (#15) scores a 9.41 — the highest in the top 20! Meanwhile, LBS (#4) scores 8.71. Does that mean Cornell is a “better” school than LBS? Of course not. It means these satisfaction scores are incredibly close, and the ranking position can be driven by a handful of sub-metrics swinging by a point or two.

The bottom line: when you see a 5-place or even 10-place gap between two schools in the ranking, the underlying data differences are often so marginal that they are, for all practical purposes, meaningless. Don’t let the ordinal ranking (“this school is 15th and that school is 20th!”) trick you into thinking there’s a chasm between them. There usually isn’t.

Here’s what I’d tell my applicants:

  1. If you’re a US applicant targeting US employment: The absence of Stanford and Columbia (and the lower positions of some other US schools) does NOT change the fundamental quality of those programs. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Booth suddenly became a “lesser” school because it’s #20 on one ranking. Please. Talk to employers, talk to alumni, look at placement data. THAT is what matters for your career.
  2. If you’re an international applicant: Pay attention to the European and Asian schools’ strong showing here. The ROI story for schools like ISB, IESE, HEC Paris, and LBS is genuinely compelling — and you don’t have to worry about visa uncertainty.
  3. Don’t chase rankings — chase FIT. The “best” MBA program is the one that is best for you, given your goals, your background, your financial situation, and the life you want to build. No ranking can tell you that.

(And as always — ApplicantLab can help you put together the strongest possible application. Just sayin’. 😉)

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What do YOU think about this year’s FT ranking? Were you surprised by any of the results? Come find me on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear your take!

Business School News | General | MBA Rankings
FT MBA Rankings 2026: Surprises, Rants, and What it Means for You!
Maria |
February 17, 2026

Video transcript, for you skimmers out there: 

I love the fact that they. Report on this metric, right? The salary percentage increase, I think is an incredibly valuable metric because there are so many business schools out there that are great for so many people. And at the end of the day, these programs are in fact able to do what a lot of business school applicants are hoping for.

They are in fact able to provide a real change in the trajectory of someone’s career. They are, in fact, able to help people leapfrog. Into a higher career stratum than they would’ve otherwise been able to be in. So from that perspective, I love the fact that the FT reports on the salary percentage increase.

So valuable. I think it helps, when sometimes I talk to people at the beginning of the business school journey, I will frequently hear something like, well, it’s M seven or bust, you know, it’s Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or bust.

And I’m often like, look, slow your roll, man. There are so many programs out there that are going to get you. They might not be the first ones that you think [00:01:00] of, but wow, does that even matter? I mean, whew. Look at some of these numbers. $170,000. That is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it’s one and a half times more than what you were making before business school.

I mean, wow. , That is life changing. , And these schools can really change people’s lives. And I think it’s important to have this metric available because I think it helps open people’s eyes. To, To be a little bit more open-minded. , And I think that’s wonderful.

Where my little quibble is. Is that I believe this is an important metric to report upon. However, I do not believe that it is a metric that should have significant amount of weight in the rankings because if we think about what is the purpose of a ranking, it is meant to be some sort of a representation of relative quality.

Now rankings. The entire concept of them is flawed the entire, for me, the entire concept of an ordinal ranking is ridiculous. Like school versus two versus four, versus seven versus six . You know, like, there, there’s sort of [00:02:00] these tiny miniature marginal differences. I think that school rankings should instead be in buckets.

Like, here is the top bucket, and then here is the also very good, but just underneath the top bucket, the next bucket. Um, but no one, no one listens to me. Uh, but so anyway, to the extent that a ranking. Is intended to be some sort of a measure of a program’s quality. I don’t think that this metric is one that should be included in the weighting.

Look, again, . Life-changing levels of improvements in salary. But when I look at, okay, so these were the top five programs by the salary percentage increase, but now when I look at it by the weighted salary, right, the top five US programs, by weighted salary, it’s not entirely accurate to say that.

Well, these programs, you start with people who have lower incoming salaries and they end up in the same place as the other programs. The numbers do not [00:03:00] really, , the numbers would tell a slightly different story. So if you look at the weighted salary a few years out for the top five programs by salary,

we’re talking about a $70,000 a year difference, roughly 240 a year versus 170 a year. That’s about a 40% difference, which I don’t think is a small, you know, if we were talking 5%, even 10%, I’d be like, yeah, 10%, that’s nothing. It’s, you know, nothing but 40% I do think is a pretty, I think it’s a pretty significant difference, uh, that is worth noting.

And so. Your point about like, well, they were letting in the people who were already on a, you know, if you were making, let’s see if we can, if we figure out, okay, so if we take this, these numbers, then we can sort of back into what’s an implied pre MBA salary, you know, that would indicate maybe something in the mid sixties before MBA versus, you know, one 10 something, [00:04:00] 1, 1 10, 1 15, for these other programs.

I get your argument. Your argument is like, look, these people were already clearly high achievers prior to business school, and so, mm-hmm. Is it not true then that the business school, like they would’ve continued to be high achievers And in fact, this is true, some of the most successful, financially successful people I know skipped business school altogether and they didn’t need it.

, However, I think GMAC often does, polls or surveys of MBA graduates, and I think the vast majority of them, at a minimum say that they’re glad that they went to business school, that they do feel that it was worth, their time. So. How much of this is,, nature versus nurture.

We, we will never know. , But I would gently push back on the fact that I, because these numbers essentially to the extent that they’re lower than say these numbers, it effectively penalizes thes e schools in this ranking. And for that reason, I don’t think that it should be part of the ranking because you’re penalizing a school for letting in more successful people.

But there’s a benefit. [00:05:00] To attending. Like, first of all, if you are a more successful person, think of the opportunity cost that you’re giving up. So the fact that these schools are able to lure away people to give up two years of their salary, in order to go to business school in the first place, I think is a pretty good indicator of the desirability or the perceived desirability of those programs.

Also, I do think that there is merit to thinking about like, who are my peers going to be in a business school? and. If a school is attracting people who were more successful prior to business school, I actually think that that is an indicator of the quality of the school, not only because it shows the people that are willing to give up those two years of salary, but also think about who the peer group is once someone is in the school.

Right? That means that if you are attending one of these schools. This percentage isn’t as high, but you’re surrounded by people who, prior to business school, were already achieving on a different level. And also after they graduate, they continue to achieve on a different level. True. The slope is not as sharp.

Right. But the.

[00:06:00] Result is a larger number. So I think that this implies that perhaps at the school itself, you might be surrounded by people who are driven. some people might say more competitive, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but people who are more driven and also after they graduate, they continue to be driven.

And so I think that also implies something pretty powerful about the ultimate benefit of the network because business school isn’t just the two years you go there and it’s not just that first job you get out of school or that third job you have five years out of school.

it’s also who’s your network gonna be and, and who are you gonna call 10, 15, 20 years after graduation? To invest in your company or to partner with your company or to start a company with. so I do think that there is value to attending a school and to have your peers during school and after school be people who were, for lack of a better term, high performers.

[00:07:00] I don’t think that this should be punished because I do think that this does yield a better business school. Experience and a better result in the long term. And so my quibble, again, I love this metric. I think this is an amazing metric to provide, but my quibble is that this should not be given honestly, any weight at all, and certainly not the high level of weight that it’s given, because again, you’re punishing the schools that, you know, you’re basically indicating that I, what I would say is an indication of quality.

An indirect indication of quality, but an indication of quality all the same. You’re basically punishing the schools that have sort of higher quality, quote unquote, coming in. And, and that to me is. Counterintuitive and kind of wrong. And so that’s why I continue to think that this should not be, uh, reported upon.

Absolutely. Tell us. It’s important. I think it’s great to know. I love using this information, but I don’t think it should be used in terms of like, let’s figure out which programs are the , [00:08:00] quote unquote highest quality programs. But what do you think? What did I miss? let me know. Thanks.

Maria

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