MBA Rankings Galore!
ApplicantLab |
October 7, 2025

Navigating the labyrinth of MBA rankings can be a daunting task, but John Byrne, Maria Wich-Vila, and Caroline Diarte Edwards are here to unravel the complexities. In this episode, they delve into a rankings extravaganza, discussing the nuances of the recent releases from Bloomberg Businessweek, LinkedIn, and QS. John starts by expressing his preference for LinkedIn, due to its unique use of proprietary data that tracks graduates’ promotions. He finds Bloomberg’s current methodology less credible compared to its origins and is quite critical of QS, dismissing it as clickbait-driven.

A major insight from their discussion is the varying methodologies behind each ranking. Caroline points out the value of understanding the raw data behind the rankings, even though LinkedIn doesn’t disclose its underlying data due to proprietary concerns. She emphasizes that LinkedIn’s focus on career progression provides a credible and objective source, as schools cannot manipulate this data. This factor alone makes LinkedIn’s ranking more appealing to candidates focused on how an MBA can enhance their career trajectory.

The hosts also highlight the importance of a global perspective, as LinkedIn’s integrated ranking of US and international schools mirrors the considerations of many applicants today. This global outlook is critical for prospective students who are evaluating diverse options for their business education. Maria and Caroline stress how vital it is for candidates to look beyond mere rankings and understand what aligns best with their personal and professional goals.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

[00:00:06] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets & Quants. Welcome to business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Caroline Diorkey Edwards and Maria Wickfilla. We have a rankings bonanza. Last month in September, three new MBA rankings came out. Bloomberg Business Week, Meek, LinkedIn, and then QS. Don’t know how familiar you are with any of these, but we’re going to dissect them for you, tell you who the winners are, tell you what you should be discounting, what you should might take seriously and what you shouldn’t take seriously at all. I mean, of the three rankings, in terms of my personal view, I like LinkedIn best because it’s based on proprietary data that basically tracks the promotions that graduates of different programs have used. And those promotions are put into the LinkedIn database by the people who have profiles there. So it’s a very different ranking. Next, I’d say Bloomberg Business Week. Now, you may know or may not know that back in 1988, I actually created this ranking. It’s changed dramatically in ways that, frankly, are disturbing to me. I believe, give it less credibility. Then finally, in terms of credibility, I put Dead Last QS, which is largely a business in Europe that does admission fares, and they do a bunch of rankings to serve as clickbait for their websites.

[00:01:47] – John

Who wins? Well, let’s start with LinkedIn first, since I like that ranking the most, and we’ll get the views, obviously, of Maria and Caroline in a second. Number One, Stanford. Number two, Harvard. Number three, NCI, number four, Wharton. Number five, the Indian School of Business. I think that makes sense because if you have a degree from an IIM or an Indian School of Business and you stay in India, you’re probably going to get promoted pretty quickly at a company there. On the other hand, how well is that degree travel? What brand recognition does it get outside of India? Admittedly, very little. In any case, Indian School of Business in the LinkedIn survey is ahead of Northwestern Kellogg at 6, MIT Sloan at 7, Dartmouth Tuck at 8, Columbia Business School 9, and then London Business School, 10. Now, you go over to Bloomberg Business Week and Stanford again wins. Wharton is 2, Berkeley is 3, Harvard Business School 4, Kellogg is 5, Dartmouth 6. There are trends here, folks. In some consensus, Chicago Booth, seven, Cornell is eight, Columbia Business School, nine. Uva Darden is number 10. Then you go over to QS, and now it’s just a crazy thing because it is what it is.

[00:03:17] – John

Number one is Wharton, incidentally on seating, Stanford, which had been number one in the QS survey a year earlier. Then number two is Harvard. Number three is MIT. Number four is Stanford. People aren’t going to complain too much about all that. Then number five is actually Atchece Paris. Six London Business School, seven Cambridge Judge, eight NCI, nine Northwestern Kellogg, Then Columbia comes in at number 10. Interestingly enough, IE business school in Spain and Madrid is number 11. These are all rankings for MBA programs. Caroline, what’s your top-of-the-line Who wants to sign this stuff?

[00:04:01] – Caroline

Well, there’s clearly no perfect ranking. I think what is interesting with the rankings is to be able to dig into the data and understand what underlies it because it can be very useful information source for candidates. I think that is often more useful than the headline ranking itself. Unfortunately, with LinkedIn, you can’t dig into the data. So they have based it on their own data, but they don’t provide the data underlying it. Perhaps, I’m not sure why that is, perhaps they want to protect their proprietary information. But I think it would be great in a future ranking if there could be a bit more transparency there. Having said that, they are a great source of hard data, right? And the schools can’t manipulate that in ways that they may be able to influence the data source for some of the other rankings. So it is perhaps the more credible amongst the rankings that we’re looking at because that data is perhaps more objective than the data underlying business week or QS. I think that’s very interesting. I mean, of course, it’s a little bit of a narrow focus because they’re just looking at the data that they have on career progression.

[00:05:26] – Caroline

But nevertheless, that is, of course, a very important data point because students are going to business school to accelerate their careers. And they have a very interesting, almost global database of pretty extensive, I’m sure, percentage of alumni from these schools with some really interesting data on career progression there. So I think that that’s the more interesting ranking here. And I like the fact that they put the US schools and the international schools in the same ranking rather than separating them out. Because candidates are often looking at both. A lot of candidates are considering different options and not just in the US or not just internationally. So I think that it’s great to put those side by side. And I think it’s very interesting how they have elevated ISB and given that more visibility. And I’m sure that it is the case. As you say, if you have a degree from that school and there’s tremendous growth in India and great opportunities, then those graduates are extremely highly regarded and enjoying fantastic mobility. I think it’s great to shine a spotlight on their success.

[00:06:50] – John

Yeah, agreed. Maria, your top-line analysis?

[00:06:54] – Maria

Yeah, I like the LinkedIn one the best, too, because it does seem like the most difficult one to be manipulated. And so I think that that makes it really credible because they are literally tracking… Sometimes when you look at, say, the career report from a given school, of course, the person or the people that they’re going to highlight in that report, it’s always going to be the most successful people. They’re not going to put in the brochure or on the website like, Hey, I’ve been unemployed for three years. They’re never going to put those negative stories. Linkedin has more into all of it. And so I think it’s really fascinating. I would love to be a fly on the wall when they are crunching all of those numbers and to see exactly which patterns emerge, et cetera. So I think that that has a lot of credibility. The one little grain of salt that I would give to candidates looking at it is just keep in mind that, of course, no one makes a ranking without some an agenda, albeit a small one. So the two little elements of the LinkedIn one that are a little bit suspicious are, first of all, for the hiring and demand, which is one of the pillars, they track it based on LinkedIn hiring data and recruiter in-mail outreach data.

[00:08:16] – Maria

So for any school that relies on LinkedIn, it’s rewarding usage of LinkedIn in a way. So if the school’s recruiters- Yeah, good point. Yeah, if they’re posting jobs on LinkedIn, then And guess what? They’re going to get more points or more credit for it within the LinkedIn ranking. However, we all know that some of those most elite jobs out there don’t ever get even publicly published anywhere. It’s done almost entirely through networking. That elite private equity firm is probably a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a fraternity brother. We were on the lacrosse team together. That networking, probably you’re not going to necessarily see them posting on LinkedIn. So that’s one little grain of salt. And then the second A Grain of salt is one of their pillars called the Networks’ Strength, which tracks network depth or how connected alumni of the same program are to each other. And so obviously, they’re trying to reward usage of LinkedIn And giving schools a reason to tell their graduates, everyone, sign up on LinkedIn, connect with everyone else on LinkedIn, because that’s the only one that has a really suspicious… I think all the top five programs under Networks’ strength, we’re all Indian programs.

[00:09:33] – Maria

And I have no doubt that there is probably super strong networking within the Indian program. I’m not questioning it entirely, but I am saying, well, if I were a business school and I were trying to optimize for this, I would make it a graduation requirement. You don’t get your diploma until you have linked in to everyone else on LinkedIn. So to the extent that those two are a little bit, and I get it. I don’t blame LinkedIn that they’re trying to encourage people to use LinkedIn, but just take some of those elements with a grain of salt. However, I do like that. I think overall it is relatively objective, and I also think that the results make sense. I don’t think that there’s any… I mean, we could always quibble with some of the… On the global level, is ISB really the fifth best business school in the world? Well, if you look at some of the LinkedIn criteria, it is. But overall, a lot of it, I think, matches is, what is intuitively what many of us who work in this space feel. I think it has credibility in terms of the results making sense.

[00:10:41] – John

Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of schools under the Indian School of business that most people would go to as opposed to the Indian School of Business, let’s face it. That’s true. I think one of the things to keep in mind when you look at any ranking is that the results are really a reflection of a methodology that’s been created by a journalist somewhere. In most cases, these journalists have very little to no knowledge of the business education market. It doesn’t mean they’re doing a bad job. It just means that they’re not really well-informed about what’s important, what’s not. Then you have the whole issue of what’s weighted and how much is one thing weighted over another. Those decisions, essentially made in a newsroom, really determine determine how the results will play out. You need to keep that in mind. You need to look under the hood of these rankings and see what’s really going on. In general, I like them because they do collect a lot of data. When you can parse a ranking for what’s important to you, it can have far more value within what the overall result is on any given list.

[00:11:53] – John

Interestingly enough, even though we like the LinkedIn ranking better than the other two that we’re talking about, our readers were far less impressed with LinkedIn, maybe because it’s the newest ranking of these three. The article that got the most views, about 42,000 views, is the Bloomberg Business Week ranking, followed by QS, which got about 30,000, followed by LinkedIn, which got a little over 5,000 only. A big, big difference. That could be It could be the result of a headline. It could be who knows what. Google didn’t pick it up. But I think it’s instructive that LinkedIn has gotten the least attention, even though we like it the most. What else about these rankings, Caroline? Of course, Business Week does a separate international ranking that we haven’t mentioned, and that looks pretty good when you look at the international schools in general, don’t you think?

[00:12:58] – Caroline

Yeah, and just something to add on the LinkedIn The European ranking, of course, it doesn’t seem to have Chinese schools in there. I guess perhaps the LinkedIn doesn’t have penetration in China. That’s a shame that they don’t have that by the nature of their database. But with the international ranking, we have Bacony at the top of the European ranking, which is interesting. They come out top for compensation and top for networking. Now, the compensation data, it says that it’s based on some hard data and then also on survey data. So whenever you get into surveys, then I think there’s so much subjectivity in there and so much variability in the data quality that I’m not sure how reliable that is. I think that’s a bit of a curious result. I think for candidates who get admitted, for example, to INSEAD London Business School and Bacony, most of them would probably choose INSEAD or London Business School above Baconi, even though this comes out top in that ranking. But it has got a good list of top schools that have done well in the ranking. And I think that sometimes what is important is not the actual positioning in the ranking and whether they’re one or the number two or the number three.

[00:14:24] – Caroline

To me, it’s more important to look at the peer group that a school in and the clusters of schools because sometimes there can be such narrow margins in the data that mean one school gets the third position versus the fourth position. So to me, it’s interesting to look at the clusters of schools, and they have a good list there in the top five, six schools, including IMD, Oxford, as well as INSEED, London Business School, and ESA, and so on. So I think it’s a pretty decent list, but I suspect that there’s some variability in the data in those surveys that means that some schools have an advantage because of response rates or the enthusiasm of alumni who do not have an objective opinion, because they’ve only experienced one school. Then when you have surveys, you wonder to what extent some schools are reaching out to alumni to mobilize them to respond, but perhaps other schools aren’t doing that. So I think there’s so much room for error in the surveys that I don’t know how reliable it is.

[00:15:42] – John

Yeah, and when you start looking at this in some detail, obvious questions crop up. I’ll give you a good example. The compensation rank in the Bloomberg Business Week ranking for Harvard is number eight. So this ranking is telling you that the MBA is at Callog, at Dartmouth, at Chicago Booth, and at Cornell, and Columbia, and even UVA Darden make more money than the MBAs at Harvard Business School. I find that really hard to believe. Largely a function of job choice and geography. Harvard being a northeastern school where pay levels tend to be higher and where the graduates are more likely to end up in consulting or VC, PE, hedge fund jobs, where the salaries are the highest should be way up there. Why can that be? How can Harvard be number eight behind seven other business schools. The reason is because this compensation rank includes a lot more than just raw starting salary and sign-on bonus. It includes some survey data of graduates that colors the actual rank. You got to be careful in what you read and how you read these things. Maria, you have any other warnings or advice for people who are using rankings to choose their schools?

[00:17:15] – Maria

Yeah. I mean, I think Caroline really hit the nail on the head earlier. Like, these can be a great place to start your search, to start to gather some information and data, but really look at it with a skeptical eye because it’s very easy to, I think, especially for business week, because it is so dependent upon surveys and alumni surveys, you have no idea if the school is, I don’t know how heavily they’re promoting it as you brought up, or I don’t know. It feels so subjective, and it also feels like any graduate of any business school knows that the better their school does in a ranking, the better it is for the entire community. The rising ranking tide lifts all boats. And so there is absolutely a benefit to me as an alumnus or alumna of any program to rank my school very, very, very, very highly, even if secretly I didn’t think it was that grade of a place. Because It’s in my… There’s an incentive for me as an alum to really make everyone think that my school is the bee’s knees. And so I think if I were to do surveys, what might make an interesting twist to this could be to say, You can name any other school except your own.

[00:18:32] – Maria

So which schools do you respect? Which schools have alumni that you respect? Which schools do you… When you work with people from those other schools, do you get the sense that they had a really good education? I know that’s a bit… That’s pretty hard to quantify, but at least it’ll have a little bit more… It won’t be quite so biased.

[00:18:50] – John

Financial Times used to actually ask that question. I don’t think they included it in their ranking. They no longer asked that question, but I thought that question always yielded some It’s interesting results.

[00:19:01] – Maria

I mean, yeah, it is interesting. Then going back to the European ones in particular. For example, IMD ranks very highly in terms of things like compensation and entrepreneurship. But I believe that IMD tends to accept a slightly different profile from some of the other schools. I believe that they tend to accept people who are already fairly senior in their careers. It is a European school, but it does, in my experience, tend to take people who are already fairly successful successful as opposed to some schools that might take people who are a little bit earlier in their careers. Just these little nuances, again, use this as a starting point, but don’t take it as something carved in stone that is scientific fact, because it’s not.

[00:19:45] – John

So true. If you want to explore these rankings in detail, go to the Fowerts & Quants website. The name on the Bloomberg Business Week or the headline on a Bloomberg Business Week MBA ranking is 2025. Bloomberg Business Week MBA ranking, Stanford retains number one spot. For the LinkedIn one, it’s 2025, LinkedIn MBA Ranking, fresh concept undercut by fatal flaw. Then for the QS ranking, it’s QS Global MBA Ranking, a new number one, Replace a Stanford after six years. You’ll find plenty to read, plenty of analysis, plenty of stuff to scratch your head and roll your eyes. But hey, don’t take it too seriously and have some fun with it. That’s my advice. All right, three new rankings in one month. My goodness, that is a complete overload, let me tell you. This is John Burn with Poetsy Fonts. Thanks for listening.

P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
MBA Rankings Galore!
ApplicantLab |
October 7, 2025

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.

ApplicantLab

New around here? ApplicantLab provides the SAME advice as high-end consultants at a much more affordable price. Read our rave reviews on GMATClub, and check out our free trial (no credit card required) today!