The Financial Times
No honest professional can deny the appeal of money. Even the starving painter, valuing art over money, sometimes needs cash. If you're human, money is at the least a nice thing to have; at most an obsession. In business, it is more than that. It is the driving force. Growing profit margins lead to opportunities: expanding the company, attention from investors, the chance to take risks on creative ideas.
Best of all for any ambitious graduate student, money provides a clear way to measure success. So it's no wonder that MBA students, like businesses, are very motivated by money. In response, most of the MBA rankings systems use salary data to measure the success of business school graduates.
None, however, place quite so much weight on salary data as international business news source the Financial Times. For the FT, salary data accounts for 40 percent of each school's score, far more than any other parameter. The other 60 percent goes to parameters less ogled over yet more indicative of the learning process: academic rankings, the opinions of alumni, and diversity measurements.
Adjustments and Weightings
Salary data may be a source of intrigue, but it can also be misleading, which is why the Financial Times adjusts salary data to account for pay discrepancies between business sectors. Some businesspeople may deem this adjustment unnecessary--after all, the purpose of business is to make money, right? Not necessarily.
MBA programs prepare many students for roles in public service and non-profits, two sectors that benefit greatly from highly functioning professionals but do not pay the financial dividends that for-profit businesses do. Similarly, there are big discrepancies in salary between industries—say, marketing and investment banking. It would be unfair to favor the schools that feed into the highest-paying industries: these industries are not necessarily the most appealing, even for the most ambitious of students, because of the lifestyle demands that accompany them.
To account for these discrepancies between industries, the FT bases one half of the salary score upon a weighted salary, which adjusts figures to smooth out differences in pay between business sectors. The other half of the salary score is based upon the percentage increase in salary from pre to post MBA. To further level the playing field, they exclude the salaries of graduates in public and nonprofit sectors.
Ranking for Faculty
After salary data, the second most important category is the faculty's academic know-how, weighted 20 percent. This category gives a nod to the classic idea that teachers' abilities, however hard to measure, deserve some sway.
This is measured using three parameters: the percentage of MBA students who go on to graduate with a doctoral degree, weighted five percent; the percentage of professors who have doctoral degrees, weighted five percent; and the faculty members' research rank, weighted 10 percent. The research rank score--essentially the faculty's level of prominence among academics and business experts--is based upon the number of faculty who've been published in the FT's list of the top 40 academic and practitioner business journals.
Asking the Alumni
Like the other British-based global-ranking system, The Economist, the Financial Times has a complexity and conscientiousness to its system.
The next biggest parameter is alumni opinions, given 11 percent of the final score. The FT surveys alumni three years out, after they have had the chance to test their education in the real world. Alumni also tend less towards bias than students, since their work experience is likely to be more of a concern at that point than their school's score in the rankings.
Foolproof or not, the survey asks alumni for scores on measures they have probably already given some thought to: value for money, career progress, aims achieved, and placement success. These parameters make up 11 percent of the final score. On top of that, the alumni's overall rating of the school is given a two-percent weighting, as is their employment status three months after graduation.
International Credentials
The fourth most important criteria used is the schools' international mobility rank. This falls in line with the remainder of the parameters, which measure diversity and progressiveness: women faculty, women students, women board; international faculty, international students, international board; international mobility rank, international experience rank, and languages.
Conclusion
In the end, the Financial Times, like The Economist, knows that there is more to life than money. Consequently, 60 percent of this ranking system goes to an analysis of the value of the learning process. Since this is a global ranking system based in Europe, it is particularly interested in whether schools can help students succeed in business across the world. And, of course, it gives substantial consideration to programs outside the U.S., with the London Business School ranking number one. Visit the full rankings here.
Newspaper photo courtesy of the Press Gazette.