This year’s Financial Times rankings sees HEC Paris in the top spot again. But the biggest mover at the top of the table – up seven places to third – is Insead, with campuses near Paris and in Singapore.

The European business schools ranking takes account both of the number of programmes and their quality.

None of the top five schools was ranked on full single programmes in all of the 2007 rankings.

HEC Paris, for example, has marks for all four tables (MBA, EMBA, Masters in Management and Executive Education) but its underlying score for EMBA is based on a proportion of the final score given to the Trium EMBA, which is a collaborative degree jointly offered by HEC Paris, New York University’s Stern School of Business and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Insead’s rise up the rankings was helped by the addition of another and highly-ranked programme this year – its EMBA was eligible for the first time and came ninth in the global ranking and fifth in Europe.

In the top half of the table, two other business schools performed especially well and romped into the top 20. They are LSE and Milan’s SDA Bocconi.

The achievement is particularly notable in the case of LSE because it is ranked on fewer than two programmes.

Like HEC Paris, it receives only a proportion of the EMBA mark assigned to the joint Trium programme.

Nonetheless, the scores it received for this and its masters in management programme in 2007 saw it move up eight places to 15th.

This is not to belittle the achievements of SDA Bocconi.

It is also ranked on fewer programmes than other schools in the top 20, and much improved scores in open enrolment and customised executive education boosted it from 30th place last year to 19th.

The data behind all of these rankings consists of figures supplied by each business school, such as percentages of international faculty, female students and employment rates for the last graduating class.

For the executive education rankings, participants in open programme and clients who bought customised programmes from each school are asked for their views.

For rankings of degree awarding programmes – MBAs, EMBAs and masters in management – alumni are surveyed three years after they graduate.

Analysis of the responses given by graduates living and working in Europe points to some interesting differences between them and their counterparts in North America. MBA graduates working in Europe are often earning more than their peers on the other side of the Atlantic.

The reverse is true for the older, battle-hardened executive MBA graduates – often more senior and experienced workers in full-time employment who complete these degrees part-time. Here, North American salaries are higher in all but two sectors, media/marketing and law. 

When asked about their reasons for doing a full-time MBA, graduate respondents from both continents cited career progress and business management education as most important.

The North Americans, who are earning slightly less than their European counterparts, put increased earnings third on the list.

The Europeans, who are generally earning the same or more, put higher salaries further down.

More senior workers in both continents agreed about their priorities for studying on an executive programme.

These were firstly, management development, followed by increased earnings and then networking. Changing career was a slightly more important goal in Europe.

In both Europe and North America, the finance and consultancy sectors are the two largest employers of MBA graduates. However, in Europe, the third most cited employment sector is industrial.

For EMBA graduates in Europe, the industrial sector is the biggest employer by some margin (26 per cent of graduates). In North America, finance is the largest.

For this European business schools ranking, 67 schools were included in the initial exercise, and 60 made it into the final table.

These include business schools based in 16 countries.

The UK has the largest presence with 20 schools. Fourteen are based in France while there are four each in Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain.

Germany, Ireland and Switzerland all have two representatives, and there is one school each from Austria, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Poland and Sweden.