Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2024 MBA ranking is chock full of surprises. Though all rankings seem to contain at least an element of the unexpected, both less than apparent and the obvious.

That Stanford’s MBA program is deemed the best in the U.S. will hardly surprise many. That Harvard deserves to languish in sixth place, behind Chicago, Northwestern, Dartmouth, and the University of Virginia might astonish many. So will the 12-place fall for Columbia Business School which not only places CBS outside the Top Ten but at a rank of 17th, even behind Georgia Tech!

Once again, Yale School of Management Deputy Dean Anjani Jain is raising significant questions about Businessweek‘s methodology. His deep examination of the ranking shows that the weights Businessweek says it used to rank schools were not properly applied.

While Businessweek claims that “compensation” accounts for 37.7% of its ranking, Jain’s analysis finds that the effective weight is much larger: 67.8%. If Businessweek correctly applied its weights, Jain found, Columbia Business School would have been ranked 27th instead of 17th and Wharton would have ranked 17th instead of seven. Businessweek has consistently stood by its ranking, disputing Jain’s findings.

His criticism isn’t isolated, of course. Privately or publicly, business school deans are alternately frustrated or angry over the collective obsession with rankings that are flawed, opaque, highly subjective, and fail to capture the educational experience their schools deliver.

From our own collected knowledge of experience and observation then, here are what we consider the ten biggest surprises in what is the 23rd time that Businessweek has ranked full-time MBA programs.

 

1) A Big Surprise: Stability In An MBA Ranking?

Rankings are often wild roller-coaster rides for business school deans. Massive declines and big leaps are a regular occurrence in most rankings which should lead users to question the lists, especially when the year-over-year changes at any school are minimal at best. Even so, it’s a given that rankings produce highly variable results from one year to the next.

So it is somewhat surprising that the 2024 Bloomberg Businessweek MBA ranking is incredibly stable. It’s as if the editors at Bloomberg Businessweek put a hand firmly down on the table to limit the tumbles that are ever present in its and every other ranking. Yale’s Anjani Jain pretty much suggests the same in his analysis of the ranking and his finding that Businessweek did not use the weights on its metrics that it claimed. A “consequence of preserving the stakeholder weights would be greater year-to-year volatility in the ranks, which would undermine the ranking’s credibility,” he writes.

This year, just 11% of the schools in the ranking saw a double-digit increase or decrease. Two years ago, 36% of the schools experienced a double-digit change in this ranking. Back then, 18 MBA programs rose by double-digits, compared to just four this year. A dozen programs plummeted in double-digits in 2021, compared to the four that rose by that amount this year.

Of course, this finding would not relieve any of the frustration deans feel if their MBA program was on the downside of this ranking. Among the schools that remained on the list and didn’t fall off entirely, UC-Davis saw the biggest decline, a drop of 26 places to rank 69th from 43rd last year. Rutgers Business School declined by 15 spots to rank 59th from 44th, while the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business plunged 13 places to rank 30th from 17th.

Even more notably, however, was a 12-place drop by Columbia Business School, falling to one of its lowest ranks ever in a major MBA ranking. Bloomberg Businessweek now ranks Columbia’s MBA program 17th best in the U.S., down from fifth place last year, a fall from grace that says much more about Bloomberg Businessweek‘s ranking than it says about the superb quality of the MBA program at Columbia.

Double-Digit Increase & Decreases In The 2024 Bloomberg Businessweek MBA Ranking

School	Y-O-Y Change	2024 Rank	2023 Rank
Ohio State (Fisher)	+13	39	52
Arizona State (Carey)	+10	29	39
Tennessee-Knoxville (Haslam)	+10	53	63
Oklahoma (Price)	+10	60	70
UC-Davis	-26	69	43
Rutgers Business School	-15	59	44
Southern California (Marshall)	-13	30	17
Columbia Business School	-12	17	5

 

 

2) What If This Was A Truly Global Ranking? 

This year and every year, Bloomberg Businessweek doesn’t merely do one full-time MBA ranking. It essentially does four lists: one for the U.S., another for Europe, one for Canada, and yet another for Asia-Pacific. And to complicate matters, the methodology for cranking out the U.S. ranking differs markedly from how it approaches non-U.S. MBA programs. Outside the U.S., diversity is not a measured metric which then changes the stated weights on the other criteria used to rank the schools.

Yet, Businessweek does have an overall index score for every ranked MBA program that would essentially allow a user to create from those scores a true global list. What would that look like and would it lead to even greater doubts about this ranking than already exist? You bet.

If you ranked these programs by their index scores, four of the Top Ten would be in Europe, led by IMD in Switzerland, IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, SDA Bocconi in Milan, Italy, and London Business School in the United Kingdom. In fact, all four of these schools would rank higher than the Harvard Business School, and IMD would be ahead of Kellogg, Wharton, MIT Sloan, and Dartmouth Tuck among others.

Among the combined Top 25, there are no Canadian or Asian-Pacific schools that would make the Bloomberg Businessweek list. Instead, European players dominate after the U.S. with seven of the programs in Europe and the remaining 18 in the U.S.

For both entertainment value and insight, here’s what it would look like:

A GLOBAL MBA RANKING BASED ON BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK INDEX SCORES

Global Rank & School	Index Score	Region
1. Stanford Graduate School of Business	88.8	U.S.
2. University of Chicago (Booth)	86.2	U.S.
3. Institute of Management Development (IMD)	86.1	Europe
4. IESE Business School	85.8	Europe
5. SDA Bocconi	85.5	Europe
5. Northwestern University (Kellogg)	85.5	U.S.
7. Dartmouth College (Tuck)	85.4	U.S.
8. London Business School	85.2	Europe
9. University of Virginia (Darden)	84.8	U.S.
10. Harvard Business School	84.2	U.S.
11. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)	84.1	U.S.
12. University of Michigan (Ross)	83.9	U.S.
13. INSEAD	83.6	Europe
13. Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)	83.9	U.S.
15. MIT (Sloan)	83.5	U.S.
16. Cornell University (Johnson)	83.3	U.S.
17. Duke University (Fuqua)	82.7	U.S.
17. Yale School of Management	82.7	U.S.
19. University of California-Berkeley (Haas)	82.6	U.S.
20. New York University (Stern)	82.3	U.S.
21. University of St. Gallen	81.6	Europe
22. Georgia Institute of Technology (Scheller)	81.3	U.S.
23. Columbia Business School	81.2	U.S./td>
24. University of California-Los Angeles (Anderson	81.0	U.S.
25. Oxford University (Said)	81.0	Europe

Listen to our Business Casual podcast: The 2024 Bloomberg Businessweek MBA Ranking
Our analysis of the new list which has Stanford on top for the sixth time in a row

 

3) USC Marshall: The Shine Has Worn Off

It helps to view USC Marshall like a sports franchise.

Step back to 2019: the Marshall School was run by Dean Jim Ellis. He had held the position for a dozen years and was highly regarded by faculty and students alike. Without warning, he was called into the office of USC’s interim president and terminated under the guise that he hadn’t responded to a series of Office of Equity and Diversity cases – most of which, Ellis claimed, he’d never even seen.

It was a tawdry affair, fueled by what many perceived as an overly ambitious but inept interim looking to position herself for the big chair. Much like the firing of a winning coach, the decision also triggered an outpouring of support for the then-71-year-old Ellis. One Faculty member described him as ““a mentor, a beacon, a great teacher and great leader,” adding that he will be remembered as a “talented development agent, [who] found ways to continue to bring top-flight students, top-dollar donors, and top faculty talent to Marshall.”

The anonymous faculty member concluded with this statement: “James Ellis has been the best dean that the MSB has ever had.”

That’s a high bar to reach. With faculty feeling blindsided and betrayed, USC dipped into the PR handbook popularized by sports teams in flux. The school decided to make a flashy hire to be the face of their franchise. And it would be hard to make a bigger statement than convincing Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett to pick up stakes and relocate to Southern California. Picture the Tampa Bay Buccaneers wooing Tom Brady from the New England Patriots to be their quarterback. Think big donations, elite faculty, cutting-edge programming, prize students, and (of course) higher rankings. Marshall would wipe the slate clean and become a West Coast Ivy, some thought.

Just one problem, Dean Garrett hasn’t turned into Tom Brady. Instead, he resembles Dan Marino – a Hall of Fame dean with a sunny disposition and inimitable traits who has delivered a slew of victories…but no championships.

That’s not to say Dean Garrett hasn’t been a free agent success who has earned every penny. Under his leadership, the school has built the nation’s 2nd-best undergraduate business program according to Poets&Quants. By the same token, Marshall now boasts a Top 10 Online MBA program, which topped out as the 3rd-best in the world a year ago. True to Garrett’s Wharton roots, Marshall has emerged as a Top 10 faculty research juggernaut globally. Since his arrival, Marshall has produced undergraduate and full-time MBA classes that have achieved gender parity. At the same time, he oversaw the core curriculum revamp that deeply embedded data-driven models and mindsets while beefing up the elective catalog to provide more options in popular areas like sustainability and analytics.

With a resume like that, you’d expect Marshall to commission a statue of Dean Garrett outside Brian Kennedy Field. However, there is one area that has bedeviled Garrett: Rankings. Exhibit A: Bloomberg Businessweek. This year, USC Marshall finished 30th, a steep 13-spot drop over the previous year. In fact, the rank places Marshall lower than where it was the year before Dean Garrett arrived (22nd). While Marshall climbed to 14th with Bloomberg Businessweek the year after Garrett arrived, the backslide must be disconcerting deva vu to the inhabitants of Bridge Hall.

69 is the number that stands out. That is where Marshall ranked among its American peers for Learning, a survey covering topics ranging from relevant content to problem-solving development to faculty support. Another number is 35, which is where Marshall ranked for its Network. That said, the latter ranking rounds counter to USC’s reputation for its Trojan Family – a highly-engaged alumni network that is hell-bent on finding internships and jobs for USC students and fellow graduates. It also flies in the face of The Financial Times’ annual survey of students and alumni, where Marshall consistently ranks among the Top 10 for its alumni network.

Mind you, a one-year decline can be dismissed as an aberration. Problem is, you could describe 2024 as Marshall’s ‘terrible, horrible, no good, very bad’ rankings reckoning. With The Financial Times, for example, USC Marshall plummeted from 21st to 33rd. That doesn’t count an 8.721 student satisfaction score (on a 10-point scale) that isn’t factored in the FT’s ranking. In U.S. News, Marshall maintained a Top 20 ranking…but still slipped from 15th to 18th. When CEOWorld surveyed c-suite executives, Marshall came in 41st – down 11 spots from the previous year. Fortune? A four-spot drop to 22nd. LinkedIn was the only major 2024 MBA ranking where Marshall boosted its stature. It rose from 19th to 17th among American programs.

Fact is, USC Marshall lost ground in five of six major MBA rankings in 2024. That’s not a methodology issue – that’s a Marshall issue. To an optimist, these declines might reflect that recent investments have yet to reach fruition. To the pessimist, this performance lays bare that the plan needs revisiting and the execution requires attention. Either way, stakeholders – like sports fans – are an impatient group. When it comes to Dean Garrett, they’re bound to ask the most pressing of questions to any franchise leader: What have you done for us lately?

4) Diversity: A Noble Cause Poorly Done 

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to make illegal race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions, it has become increasingly difficult for admission officers to recruit and enroll minority students. Private universities often have more leeway to use their scholarship funds to entice under-represented minorities to their schools, but most public universities are severely constrained in their ability to craft a racially diverse class of incoming students.

To its credit, Bloomberg Businessweek has tried to give schools incentives to enroll more URM and female MBA students by including diversity as one of five core metrics in its MBA ranking. Half of the diversity score is based on gender, while the other half is based on race. The data used in this year’s ranking is for cohorts that entered their MBA programs in the fall of 2023 just before the Supreme Court’s June 29th decision. So the metric doesn’t reflect the impact of that ruling on diversity in MBA admissions.

In any case, diversity is the least weighted category of the five ranking criteria–worth only 6.6% of an MBA program’s place on the list. Compensation, at 37.7%, is valued at nearly six times the diversity metric. Businessweek doesn’t even bother to measure the diversity of non-U.S. programs because many schools outside the U.S. do not closely track the racial identity of their students.

There are numerous problems with Businessweek‘s methodology that make its diversity measure an awful metric, unfair to both public universities and schools that enroll larger cohorts of MBA students. No less troublesome, it provides incentives to admission officials that can lead to perverse outcomes. It’s no accident that George Washington University’s business school ranks first this year: It entered a cohort of just 65 students, with 65% of the class female or non-binary, 29% black, 16% Hispanic, and 13% Asian. Only 32% are white at a time when 62% of the U.S. population is white. The small size of the school’s MBA class and its status as a private university makes it a lot easier to enroll a diverse class.

And the number two MBA program for diversity, according to Businessweek? It is one of the least diverse business schools in the U.S.: Howard University. Businessweek‘s methodology awards schools NOT for diversity but for enrolling URM students and women. Howard, which enrolled a class of only 23 MBA students fails to even rank among the 75 U.S. schools this year. It has no white or Asian students in its cohort, no Native Americans, and no Pacific Islanders. Some 92% of the students are black, with the remaining 8% identifying as Hispanic. Women make up 54% of the MBA students. Surely, a school that enrolls no white or Asian students can hardly be thought of as diverse.

Based on Businessweek‘s narrow definition of diversity, a school gets no credit for international students, first-generation college students, or industry and educational backgrounds–all metrics of a truly diverse class that are as important if not more important than what Businessweek measures.

And then there is a head-scratching formula Businessweek applies to URM students. The methodology blatantly discriminates against Asian Americans. In fact, schools get five times the credit for enrolling a black student over an Asian American and nearly six times the credit over a Hispanic. And if a school really wanted to game the ranking, all it has to do is spend more time in Alaska recruiting students. Every enrolled Alaskan native in the U.S. MBA program is worth nearly ten times an Asian American and twice as much as a black student.

That’s because Businessweek applies a “multiplier” on each of these racial categories (see table below) to account for the “GMAT pipeline” even though well over a third of MBA students are now admitted with a GRE score. The multiplier is used to adjust a school’s minority group population based on that group’s presence in the GMAT test-taking population relative to the U.S. population. This numerical witchcraft makes it harder to decode the ranking’s legitimacy and is yet another less transparent aspect of the methodology. Deploying such a formulate on GMAT test takers is also hardly relevant at a time when so many of the ranked MBA programs are test-optional or generous in granting standardized test waivers.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Racial Multiplier

So the takeaway here for MBA administrators is simple? Do not take this metric seriously. You can lump it into that George Bush category of voodoo economics. Or you can do something that may well be more ridiculous. Have your admissions team make recent trips to Alaska and award Alaska Natives, particularly female ones, full-ride scholarships. It’s a sure way to game this oddball metric.

TOP 25 FOR DIVERSITY ACCORDING TO BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

Diversity Rank & School	Index Score	Women	Black	Hispanic	Asian
1. George Washington	94.6	65%	29%	16%	13%
2. Howard University	94.5	54%	92%	8%	0%
3. Morgan State (Graves)	87.5	44%	75%	17%	0%
4. Pennsylvania (Wharton)	82.6	50%	14%	9%	31
5. Baruch (Zicklin)	82.5	42%	24%	24%	12%
5. Rochester (Simon)	82.5	47%	16%	16%	26
7. Northeastern (D’Amore-McKim)	82.0	56%	15%	4%	19%
8. San Diego (Knauss)	80.9	45%	3%	22%	6%
9. Southern Methodist (Cox)	80.6	48%	18%	8%	4%
9. Syracuse (Whitman)	80.6	42%	13%	13%	0%
11. Cornell (Johnson)	80.4	44%	15%	15%	26%
11. Hult International	80.4	45%	14%	14%	14%
13. SUNY at Buffalo	80.2	51%	14%	8%	11%
13. Washington (Foster)	80.2	47%	12%	12%	31%
15. Boston University (Questrom)	80.1%	39%	6%	17%	31%
16. MIT (Sloan)	79.9	46%	11%	16%	26%
17. Stanford	78.6	46%	8%	12%	24%
18. Harvard	77.9	45%	10%	11%	22%
19. Duke (Fuqua)	77.7	45%	14%	13%	14%
20. Tulane (Freeman)	77.7	44%	4%	22%	0%
21. Northwestern (Kellogg)	77.6	48%	8%	10%	24%
22. Rochester Tech (Saunders)	77.3	49%	7%	6%	5%
22. Tampa (Sykes)	77.3	44%	2%	17%	1%
24. Rutgers	77.0	42%	6%	19%	38%
25. Washington (Olin)	76.0	37%	15%	20%	12%

5) Defying Conventional Wisdom: IMD 

Ask the most knowledgeable observers of MBA education in Europe to name the top two business schools and you will inevitably get this answer: INSEAD and London Business School. But Bloomberg Businessweek clearly thinks otherwise in naming the Institute of Management Development the best program in Europe.

This is no anomaly. IMD has topped the Businessweek MBA lists in four of the past five rankings, with only one exception. Last year, SDA Bocconi in Italy nudged out IMD which placed third.

What makes IMD so special? It is among the most diverse and most differentiated MBA experiences in the world. While much of MBA programming is commoditized, IMD is anything but. Originally founded by business executives for business executives, IMD’s 12-month program is heavy on personal coaching and individual development. It boasts significant experiential learning with top companies and an immersive month at the school’s Future Lab in Singapore.

No less critical, IMD has been at the forefront of change. With most professors still debating exactly what to do about the AI revolution, IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, has devised an innovative answer. In a major redesign of its one-year MBA curriculum, IMD is betting that human skills not easily duplicated by machine intelligence is the best way to prepare students for the AI future.

The school’s reimagined MBA experience, to take effect when it enrolls its new MBA cohort in January, is one of the boldest changes yet in response to how powerful AI will change society and the world of work. For one thing, the new program acknowledges that we are not living with change as usual. The MBA curriculum—informed by corporate executives, faculty, and alumni—accepts that the world is fundamentally changing with the advent of machine intelligence.

A business school must now double down on the humanistic skills not easily duplicated by a machine and must teach a new generation of students how best to collaborate—not only with each other—but with the machines that will sit side by side with them. IMD believes it must place an even greater focus on the human qualities of leadership and enabling change, as these are critical in a world of abundant data and AI.

At IMD, that means a full embrace of AI technologies to do things that graduates had once done on their own. It also means that skill development has become as important if not more so than the knowledge dispensed in traditional coursework.

Among the innovations in IMD’s redesign is an intense focus on ten core skills that range from systems thinking and pattern recognition to storytelling and presentation (see table below). To emphasize the teaching of those skills, IMD students will now receive two grades: a course grade based on the knowledge they are taught and another for the skills they develop and demonstrate.

“We reorganized everything,” says Omar Toulan, MBA dean at IMD. “We needed to take this up to another level. We are focusing on elemental human traits. I have yet to see an AI system that can be an effective leader. You still need someone in the room to use judgment in making the final decision and motivate people to implement it, someone with the intelligence and the courage to make difficult decisions. I would put my bet on leadership.”

“People wanted a greater emphasis on skill-based learning and not just course-based learning,” says Toulan. “We worked down to a list of critical skills we want to track across the entire program (see table below). These are skills that an MBA needs to dominate before they go to the job market. By working with every professor in the program, we can identify how a person is doing on certain skills. When you go into a job interview, you are not there with a team. It’s just you, so you need to have those skills at the individual level.”

IMD’s number-one ranking is no fluke.

IMD Tops The European Business Schools In Bloomberg Businessweek’s MBA Ranking

Rank & School	Y-O-Y Change	Compensation	Learning	Networking	Entrepreneurship
1. IMD	+1	86.6	89.3	83.3	83.7
2. IESE Business School	——–	84.1	89.7	85.3	83.5
3. SDA Bocconi	-2	86.1	88.6	83.8	80.7
4. London Business School	+1	89.4	84.2	84.4	77.2
5. INSEAD	-1	82.2	86.8	84.6	79.5
6. St. Gallen	+2	81.5	86.1	81.0	74.5
7. Oxford (Said)	+3	76.9	86.0	81.2	81.9
8. Cambridge (Judge)	+1	72.7	86.0	81.7	81.8
9. ESADE	+2	67.4	88.7	84.1	86.2
10. Mannheim	-3	75.8	82.8	81.4	67.6
11. IE Business School	-5	72.0	83.1	74.9	83.2
12. Cranfield	——–	56.4	90.1	82.5	85.9
13. Copenhagen Business School	+4	63.9	86.2	80.0	73.7
14. ESMT Berlin	+2	63.8	84.0	78.7	78.5
15. POLMI Graduate School of Management	+4	61.7	84.9	78.7	76.1
16. EADA	+2	61.8	86.3	73.4	78.6
17. ESIC	-2	58.5	86.1	78.6	79.1
18. EDHEC	-5	56.6	81.9	76.5	71.9
19. EAE	+1	48.8	80.3	73.4	75.7

The full-time MBA program at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business raced from 19th to 9th in this year’s Bloomberg Businessweek ranking, besting M7’s MIT Sloan and Columbia Business School in the process

6) Two Big Winners – and A Big Loser

There are no participation trophies in the rankings. You move up or move down. You’re heralded as the next “It” school – or people wonder if you’ve lost a step or need to reset priorities. Either way, you’re bound to find overreactions from applicants, students, alumni, administrators…and media outlets too.

Case in point: Colubmia Business School. Clearly, CBS’ benefits didn’t align with Bloomberg Businessweek’s methodology, as the school dived from 5th to 17th. One issue: Pay – which Businessweek claims is worth a 37.7% share of the ranking. Here, Columbia Business School dropped from 2nd to 13th. And the news gets worse from there. In Learning, which accounts for a 25.5% share, CBS lost 28 spots to end up at 57th. Networking carries an 18.6% weight – and Columbia sank from 12th to 29th. With Entrepreneurship, good for an 11.6% share, the school suffered a freefall, going from 16th to 45th. In a pyrrhic victory, CBS only lost four spots in Diversity – the smallest weight at 6.6%,

What happened? Hard to say as Bloomberg Businessweek doesn’t publish underlying data. The Financial Times showed minor flags, as the school’s satisfaction rate among alumni and students dipped from 9.51 to 9.225 over the past year (even as the same surveys showed improvement in career services and alumni network). MBA pay also slipped from 2nd to 4th according to FT data. Does this mean CBS Is no longer a Top 10 program? More likely, it is a blip considering the school has ranked anywhere from 5th to 9th with Bloomberg Businessweek since 2018 (and even gained three spots in last year’s ranking). Regardless, CBS will be placed under the microscope until the next big ranking (Think FT in February).

That said, two schools can certainly crow about the results. That starts with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, which climbed from 7th to 3rd. Along the way, Kellogg vaulted over Dartmouth Tuck, Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and Virginia Darden for bragging rights. Sure, Kellogg still ranks below cross-town rival Chicago Booth, but it improved in 4 out of 5 measures (while holding its 15th place in Entrepreneurship from the previous year). Notably, the school finished 5th in Compensation (+3) and 4th in Networking (+4) among American schools, while sliding into 10th for Learning as well. That’s three Top 10 finishes in measures worth a collective 81.8% weight. In comparison, only Stanford GSB, Dartmouth Tuck, Carnegie Mellon Tepper, and William & Mary Mason scored that high across that many measures! Even more, with Kellogg also ranking 3rd in both U.S. News and Fortune, it cements an impression that maybe Kellogg belongs in the same conversation as Stanford and Wharton. After all, perception is everything.

Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School should also take a bow, pop a champagne cork, and take a victory lab this week.  They raced from 19th to 9th this year, besting M7’s MIT Sloan and Columbia Business School in the process. Call it the capper to a banner year, where Tepper moved up in the Financial Times, U.S. News, CEOWorld, and Fortune rankings. Notably, Tepper posted the 3rd-highest score in Entrepreneurship, while ranking 5th in both Learning and Networking with Bloomberg Businessweek.

It seems like just yesterday – January 2023 to be exact – when Columbia Business School was toasted as the world’s top MBA program by The Financial Times. Even after slipping to 3rd this year, most believed Columbia had staked their claim as a program on the rise. While opening a $600 million campus in Manhattanville in 2022, the school also invested heavily in becoming leaders in the subjects of the future: digital disruption, machine learning, climate change, and sustainability. And they ranked among the five best business schools for faculty research this year according to The Financial Times.

While rankings may not be the arbiters of reality, they are unquestionably the barometer of perception. CBS’ decline may not be rooted in its programming but in basic branding. In the end, a crack in the latter is easily more lethal and harder to clean up.

7) Insurgents At The Gate: Three Schools Poised To Make A Run

The M7 is a pretty steady gig. Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg, MIT Sloan, Columbia – they’ve been lumped together as the American elite, sharing each other’s prestige and achievements. Call it Branding 101: once you’re positioned among a select group, it is difficult to be displaced – even among rankings aficionados.

Past the M7, you’ll find Dartmouth Tuck and UC Berkeley Haas, academic powerhouses and culture-driven programs that can never squeeze into the M7’s space. The final spot in the Top 10? Generally, it rotates among the likes of Michigan Ross and UVA Darden.

Comforting consistency and predictability to some – depressingly daunting and self-fulfilling to others.

That is…until the 2024-2025 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking hit the net – and a pattern emerged just below the Top 10. Call them the Terrifying Troika: Cornell Johnson, Duke Fuqua, and Yale SOM – all programs with big names, distinctive identities and formidable resources. Even more, each is carrying momentum into 2025.

Let’s start with Cornell Johnson, which has yo-yoed up-and-down Bloomberg Businessweek over the past five years. It returned to the 11th spot in 2025 – no different than 2022 and 2019.  One reason: Johnson excelled in the dimension that mattered most to Bloomberg Businessweek: Compensation. Worth a 37.7% share of the weight, Johnson ranked 8th overall – a far better showing for Johnson than The Financial Times, where the program finished 15th among American schools (a measure covering alumni pay within three years of graduation). By excelling in Compensation, Johnson offset a 32nd-place finish for Learning in Bloomberg Businessweek – a dimension worth a 25.5% weight. However, the Learning ranking may be a misnomer. In a similar survey conducted by The Princeton Review in 2024, Cornell earned the 2nd-highest marks from current students surveyed in this area – not to mention the best scores overall for its administration and family-friendliness. While Johnson finished 21st for its Network, the school ranked 3rd in a similar student and alumni poll conducted by The Financial Times in 2023.

In other words, Cornell Johnson shows the capacity to make a big improvement in two dimensions – Learning and Networking – that carry a 44.1% combined weight with Bloomberg Businessweek.

Duke Fuqua and Yale SOM tied for the 12th spot – moving up two and three spots respectively. For Fuqua, 12th is the highest ranking it has held over the past six years (though it did place 1st in the 2014 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking). In contrast, 2025 is a bounce-back year for Yale SOM, which fell from 10th to 15th between 2022-2023. Both follow a similar path as Cornell Johnson. They placed highly in Compensation (11th for Duke and 10th for Yale), lower in Learning (29th for Duke and 22nd for Yale), and mixed in Network (11th for Duke and 22nd for Yale). However, their differentiators are momentum. Both have shown marked improvements in recent years in MBA rankings. Among American programs in The Financial Times, both rank among the ten-best, each rising several spots over the past year. In the American-centric U.S. News ranking, Yale SOM has remained a Top 10 stalwart for the past five years, while Duke Fuqua has bee-bopped between 11th and 12th during the same period. In the CEOWorld ranking, Yale SOM finished 9th globally, while Duke Fuqua reached 8th in America with Fortune. Among American programs, Duke Fuqua and Yale SOM ranked 10th and 11th with LinkedIn.

In some respects, you could say that Cornell Johnson, Duke Fuqua, and Yale SOM are already Top 10 programs according to alternative rankings to Bloomberg Businessweek. In Ancient Rome, you may have described them as the ‘Barbarians at the Gate” – a presence outside the city walls that reflected that the incumbents no longer dictated all the rules within their sphere. In this case, the schools are better described as insurgents – schools who’ve invested heavily in building cultures, serving students, and satisfying employers. In the process, they have inserted themselves in the Top 10 conversation.

That said, the real work is ahead. After all, Columbia Business School – ranked as the #1 school in the world by The Financial Times just a year ago – will certainly bounce back from a 12-spot drop in the 2024-2025 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking. The same is true for 14th-ranked UC Berkeley Haas, which climbed back to 10th after the last time it finished 14th in 2022. There is always NYU Stern, which has traditionally pinballed between 11th and 13th in recent years with Bloomberg Businessweek. Let’s not forget Georgia Tech Scheller and Vanderbilt Owen, schools that made impressive strides in 2024-2025 and are now pressing to make the next step. The Terrifying Troika may be on the cusp of redefining the status quo, but there are plenty of program nipping at their heels.

It’s competition. It’s disruption. Capitalism at its finest. Business schools champion it. They teach it. Sure enough, they too live it.

8) International Schools: The Message Is Loud and Clear   

The U.S. News & World Report MBA Ranking absorbs lots of criticism. Too many ties. Too much weight on second-hand academic sentiment. Too much emphasis on inputs that reduce school mobility. However, it is the “U.S.” part of the ranking that hinders it the most. It doesn’t include international MBA programs – as if Americans won’t cross the oceans to learn leadership at London Business School or Asian business practices at CEIBS.

U.S. News’ message to the rest of the world: You don’t matter.

Alas, U.S. News is becoming a vestige of America-centric thinking. This fall, LinkedIn included international programs in their second-annual MBA ranking. The result: 7 international programs cracked the Top 20, with 24 represented among the Top 50. In fact, INSEAD ranked as the 2nd-best program in the world according to LinkedIn’s methodology. CEOWorld also takes a global view – and ranked the London Business School as the top business school in the world earlier this year. Of course, there is always The Financial Times, which has consistently allowed North American, European, Asian, and Latin American programs to go head-to-head. This year, 3 of the 5 highest-ranked programs in the FT – INSEAD, SDA Bocconi, and IESE Business School – hail from Europe. Overall, just 43 American programs grace The Financial Times’ Top 100.

Aside from Fortune and U.S. News, that leaves Bloomberg Businessweek clinging to an America First approach. Of course, Bloomberg Businessweek attempts to have it both ways. They rank international programs – but separate from American ones. In fact, Bloomberg Businessweek produces separate rankings for Europe, Asia, and Canada altogether.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s message to the rest of the world: You can’t compete.

Unless you are in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, whose schools are conspicuously absent. Then, Bloomberg Businessweek’s message is the same as U.S. News: You don’t matter.

More damning, Bloomberg Businessweek saddles American programs with a Diversity weight of 6.6%, divided equally between gender and minority populations. Hence, American schools are evaluated differently from their international counterparts. In other words, readers cannot make apples-to-apples comparisons on index scores when Networking, for example, is worth 18.6% in the United States and 23.8% elsewhere. Using this example, by Bloomberg Businessweek’s logic, it is apparently easier to find opportunities in the United States. Hence, classmate and alumni connections are less valuable there!

Back to Diversity, Bloomberg Businessweek rewards some schools and penalizes others in this dimension. Take Toronto Rotman, which boasted 49% women in the Class of 2025. While Rotman wasn’t included in the Bloomberg Businessweek Canadian ranking – despite ranking as the 2nd-best Canadian MBA program by The Financial Times – it wouldn’t receive any extra rankings push for achieving near gender parity. In contrast, IIM Bangalore, where women made up a 12% share of the last EPGP class, would not be penalized for a smaller percentage as would an American program.

While the United States is considered the melting pot, why should it be held to a higher standard on enrolling minorities? In the United Kingdom, for example, wouldn’t it be equally logical for business schools to be rewarded for enrolling a higher percentage of the country’s GMAT-taking population who may be Black, Asian, Indian, or Middle Eastern? Last year, 85% of IESE Business School’s incoming class hailed from outside Spain. Shouldn’t the methodology reward European schools – with many top programs traditionally enrolling 80% or more of their student population from outside their home country – for sponsoring such diverse classes?

In other words, should Bloomberg Businessweek apply a more rigid standard internationally that only accounts for the underrepresented members in a school’s home country – or should international recruiting earn some extra goodwill? Such questions reflect a caste system between American and international programs that simply cannot be bridged. As a result, it produces a wedge that hampers readers in their early research on programs.

Make no mistake: Bloomberg Businessweek’s international rankings require some rethinking. After all, it views the United States as the outlier and proceeds to lump the rest of the world together under the same methodology, Translation: Bloomberg Businessweek approaches Europe, Asia, and Canada as if there are no distinct variations in measures like average pay and cost of living or percentage of international (with Indian classes composed mostly of students from the home country). To go further, there are notable omissions in this year’s ranking. IIM Ahmedabad is considered best-in-class for graduate business education in India. However, the school doesn’t even appear in the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking. It also doesn’t include Top 50 FT programs like the National University of Singapore, Fudan University, Nanyang University, and Hong Kong University. That begs the question: How much effort did Bloomberg Businessweek really put into the Asia ranking?

Fair, transparent, and comprehensive. That’s all you can expect from a business school ranking. It’s a starting point after all. Bloomberg Businessweek’s inability to fully disclose underlying questions and data has already called its transparency into question. The non-American rankings do the same for its fairness and comprehensiveness.

9) A Tale of Two Rankings Favorites: William & Mary and Georgia Terry

Every ranking finds a school that unexpectedly fits with its priorities. For years, U.S. News & World Report had pegged the University of Texas at Dallas’ Jindal School as a Top 40 school long before it made the radar of other outlets. SDA Bocconi spent a decade slowly climbing The Financial Times ranking before it reached the top spot in Bloomberg Businessweek’s European ranking last year. This year, LinkedIn listed the Indian School of Business as the #6 MBA program in the world – ahead of Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg, and London Business School, no less.

The University of Georgia’s Terry College is another school whose ascension has been a clandestine affair. The Financial Times ranked it 40th this year, after finishing 61st and 80th the previous two years. Notably, Terry produced the ranking’s highest Value for Money score, along with placing 14th for Career Services. In U.S. News, Terry creeped up to 27th after finishing 38th just two years earlier. You’ll even find Terry popping up on the LinkedIn and Fortune rankings this year. That’s not bad for a program that is overshadowed by two Top 25 MBA programs in the same state: Emory Goizueta and Georgia Tech Scheller.

Naturally, you’d expect Terry to make an impression on Bloomberg Businessweek.

Think again.

This year, Terry scraped together a 35th-place finish. No shame in that – except that it represents an 8-spot drop over the previous year (though Terry ranked 50th in 2021). Learning is Terry’s strength; the school ranks 15th in this dimension, delivering an academic experience superior to MIT Sloan and four Ivy League programs. The downfall: Compensation – where Terry ranks 35th.

In reality, Bloomberg Businessweek has eyes for a different undervalued program: The College of William & Mary’s Mason School. Mason ranks 32nd this year, up four spots from last year (and up 26 spots from 2021). That’s quite a difference from The Financial Times (76th), LinkedIn (Unranked), and Fortune (52nd) – though Mason did reach 40th with U.S. News this spring.

In Virginia, the Darden School is regarded as the ultimate MBA learning experience, anchored by rock star teachers and case study immersion. Ironically, according to student surveys conducted by Bloomberg Businessweek, Mason garners the highest scores among American programs for Learning. An anomaly? Guess again. According to a similar student survey conducted by The Princeton Review in 2024, Mason notched the 5th-highest scores for Faculty Quality. Back to Bloomberg Businessweek, Mason also achieved two more top 10 finishes: Entrepreneurship (8th) and Networking (9th). Sadly, quality doesn’t yield quantity for Mason grads. The school ranks 45th for Compensation – a dimension based on a near equal mix of survey questions and alumni pay data.

In the end, Terry and Mason are borderline Top 30 programs at this point. However, each brings something unique to the table. Terry is the ultimate low-cost and high-return program with a small class size and high personal touch that is unique among public programs. Being 75 miles from Atlanta is another advantage for Terry. In Mason’s case, you can expect academic excellence and an engaged alumni base according to survey-takers. In Williamsburg, you can get away from all the crowds, noise, and traffic – but not too far. After all, DC is just 2.5 hours away…and you can make Norfolk in under an hour.

Either way, MBAs can’t lose with Terry or Mason. Both are up-and-comers whose MBA degrees will only increase in value over time. Along the way, they’re bound to knock a few more programs down a notch in the rankings.

10) Bloomberg Businessweek’s Transparency Problem

Businessweek uses an astonishing 2,184 words to explain how it ranks full-time MBA programs this year. If you had the fortitude to read through its description of the methodology, however, you would be left scratching your head. How can anyone spend well over 2,000 words and be less than transparent?

Somehow, Bloomberg Businessweek does it. Transparency is important to a ranking. Readers need to know exactly what goes into a school’s rank, and schools need to be able to reverse engineer their rankings to gain the assurance that it is accurate. Good luck to any academic who tries to replicate this ranking.

It’s not that you won’t learn a lot by reading through the methodology. One thing it makes clear is that a lot of thought was put into the creation of the list by the magazine’s editors. Yet, it is still wanting.

Consider how Businessweek‘s describes how it calculates a school’s score for networking, one of five criteria in the ranking for U.S. business schools. “This index gauges the quality of networks cultivated by classmates; students’ interactions with alumni; effectiveness of the career services office; quality and breadth of alumni-to-alumni interactions; and the school’s brand power, according to recruiters.”

That’s it. We have no idea of the exact questions being asked of alumni, students or recruiters. We are not told how these different attributes are measured by Businessweek nor what weight each might carry in the index score. It’s a black box.

The same is true for its “entrepreneurship” category. “Students and alumni tell us whether their school took entrepreneurship as seriously as other career paths and rate the quality of training they received to start a small business or startup. Recruiters rate schools according to whether graduates show exceptional entrepreneurial skills and drive.”

With the help of the business schools, the magazine notes that it surveyed 5,292 students, 9,222 alumni, and 734 employers for this ranking. But contrary to journalistic standards, it does not reveal the actual responses rate for each of these surveys. Instead, it reports elsewhere that it received 7,474 responses from students and alumni from three graduating classes in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

It was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who famously noted that “sunlight is the best of disinfectants.”

Bloomberg Businessweek needs a lot more sunlight.

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