Students from the graduating class of 2003, who were surveyed for this year’s MBA ranking, must have embarked on their programmes with more trepidation than the average aspiring business student.
View pdf: Alumni and school data graphs
In the US, where MBA programmes generally last 20 months, the 2003 grads were just about to arrive on campus, or were part-way through pre-term crammer courses, when the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington happened in September 2001. These students had no idea if, or how, the world was going to change.
In countries where MBA programmes are shorter, at 10 to 18 months, most respondents to this year’s survey will have begun their studies in 2002. This must also have taken guts and gumption.
By this stage, many of the largest financial services and consulting firms, which employ the lion’s share of new business graduates, were in the process of cutting recruitment and, for the first time in years, average MBA salaries had fallen.
However, the results of the 2007 survey show that those who held their nerve and went through with their degree regardless, have been vindicated. The average salary of a 2003 graduate today, typically a 33-year-old, is about $120,000 a year. This rises to almost $150,000 for those who went to one of this year’s top 10 schools.
The underlying salary figures from which the overall averages are created provide evidence of some unexpected changes in alumni earnings compared with last year. MBA graduates in Canada, for example, are frequently earning less this year than those who reported back to us last year: average salaries are down for three of the five Canadian schools in the top 100 and salary percentage increases are down for all five. This has translated to lower rankings for all of these schools.
UK business schools, however, have benefited from improvements in their graduates’ salary percentage increases this year. This goes against a more widespread trend of smaller increases compared with last year. Only 23 schools managed a larger salary percentage increase than last year. Of these, eight were from the UK.
Even if multiples of pre-MBA salaries are not quite what they used to be, this year’s global top 10 list contains all the usual suspects. Indeed, nine of them have appeared in the top flight every year for the past three years and eight have been ranked in the top 10 every year for the last six.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania remains seemingly unassailable in the top spot for the seventh consecutive year.
A combination of great salaries and research output put it such a long way ahead that the school in second place would have to improve its scores by 14 per cent to surpass it. It was also the school that received the highest number of alumni recommendations.
This year, Columbia Business School moved up two places, the largest move of any school in the top 10, to narrowly beat Harvard Business School and Stanford University Graduate School of Business to second place. It achieved this with a strong weighted salary and salary percentage increase. One alumnus wrote of his experience: “I did not go into business school with a specific career path in mind. Since then…all jobs [I have done] have been remarkably different. The only constant among them is how valuable my Columbia MBA has been. From networking resources, to the currency of the degree to the amazing education – my life would not be nearly the same without [it].’”
Outside of the top 10, there have been some larger fluctuations in the ranking. This is partly a function of the distribution of the marks between the top and bottom of the table. So, while Wharton, at the top, is a long way ahead of its business school peers, the gaps separating many other schools are generally of a much smaller order. This is reflected in the increasing number of tied positions which can be seen as the reader looks down the ranking.
Moreover, making the leap from three quarters of the way down the table to half way down is much easier than moving from sixth to third, for example.
The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, is a case in point. It moved up 33 places to 49 this year. It was one of the relatively small number of schools that managed healthier salary percentage increases than last year. Their alumni reported much better career progression than last year and it also moved up four places in the FT research ranking. The FT allocates 26 per cent of the marks to areas relating to faculty, including diversity, level of qualification and research output.
Business schools based in 15 different countries are represented in this year’s ranking of top 100 global MBA programmes. These include 60 US schools – up from 57 in 2006 – 16 UK schools, five from Canada, four from Spain, two each from Australia, France, Ireland, Singapore and the Netherlands and one each from Brazil, China, Italy, South Africa and Switzerland.
