This is the fourth year the Financial Times has produced a ranking of European business schools.
This “ranking of rankings” is based on the five Financial Times business education rankings published in 2007; full-time MBA (published in January), the open enrolment (May) and customised non-degree executive education programmes (May), European masters in management degrees (September) and Executive MBA (October).
The European business schools ranking takes into account the number of programmes ranked by the FT for each European school and the quality of these programmes as assessed by the rankings.
All the criteria from each of the rankings are used in its compilation; 20 criteria from the MBA ranking, 16 from the open programmes executive education ranking, 16 from the custom programmes ranking, 16 from the European masters in management ranking and 16 from the EMBA ranking.
There are some differences in the criteria used to compile the different rankings. For example, the MBA and EMBA tables measure the amount of research undertaken by faculty members at each school, whereas the European masters in management and executive education rankings do not.
Another important difference is that the EMBA, MBA and European masters in management rankings include alumni salary data, whereas the executive education rankings do not. All criteria used can be viewed at: www.ft.com/businesseducation/mba
The first stage in the compilation process is to produce tables that contain only the European schools for each of the separate rankings. Those European schools that did not make it into the final table for each ranking (the top 100 in MBA, the top 90 in EMBA, etc) are reinstated before each ranking is rerun to contain European schools only.
Any European schools that appear in just one ranking, and this on the basis of a jointly offered programme only, are not included.
These new European-only tables include z-scores for each school for each ranking that they participate in. Z-scores take into account the differences in score between each school in the ranking and spread between top and bottom school.
If a school participates in more than one programme within a given ranking, the programme z-scores are weighted and combined. If a school participates in a ranking on the basis of a joint programme only, it receives a proportion of the total z-score for the programme, based on the number of partner schools they offered the programme with.
The z-scores are then converted to indices so all scores for all rankings are within the same range. The indexed scores are added together and are also averaged out, depending on the number of rankings each school takes part in. The total and average figures are then weighted and combined to give the final score for each school. The ranks displayed are based on this final score.
Because of the limited space available, only a few of the individual ranking criteria are displayed in the final table. These include the most heavily-weighted criteria for some of the rankings; salary data (for the MBA, EMBA and European masters in management rankings) and salary percentage increases for the MBA and EMBA rankings.
From the executive education rankings, both customised and open programmes, only the final ranks are displayed. In both cases, no one criterion contributes a particularly high percentage of the final mark.
Finally, it is worth remembering that all the individual ranking data in the table are shown primarily for information purposes. The overall European business schools ranking itself is based on the indexed scores behind the individual rankings. It is not a simple aggregation of the ranking positions.
Additional research by Shilpa Viswanath. Database consultant Judith Pizer of Jeff Head Associates, Amersham, UK
