FT Executive MBA 2019: methodology

This is the 19th edition of the FT’s annual ranking of the world’s top 100 executive MBA programmes for senior working managers.

Participation in the ranking is voluntary and at the business school’s request. EMBA programmes must meet certain criteria to be eligible. First the school must be accredited by either the US’s Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business or Europe’s Equis. The EMBA must be cohort-based, with students enrolling and graduating together, and with at least 30 graduates each year.

A total of 136 programmes took part in the 2019 ranking process, including 15 joint programmes delivered by more than one school. Six new schools feature in our table.

Data for the ranking are collected using two online surveys, the first completed by participating schools and the second by alumni who graduated from programmes in 2016. The FT requires a response rate of 20 per cent (or 20 fully completed responses, whichever is the greater) from the alumni survey for a school to be considered for the final ranking. About 4,100 alumni completed the survey — an overall response rate of around 41 per cent.

Alumni responses inform five ranking criteria: salary today, salary increase, career progress, work experience and aims achieved. Together they account for 55 per cent of the ranking’s weight. The first two criteria about alumni salaries each count for 20 per cent.

Salaries of non-profit and public sector workers, as well as full-time students, are removed. Remaining salaries are converted to US dollars using the latest purchasing power parity (PPP) rates supplied by the International Monetary Fund. The highest and lowest salaries are then removed and the mean average “current salary” is calculated for each school. Salary increase is calculated according to the difference in average salary before the EMBA to three years after graduation. Half of the ranking weight is applied to the absolute increase and the other half to the percentage increase relative to pre-EMBA pay.

When available, alumni criteria are informed by the past three surveys. Responses from the 2019 survey carry 50 per cent of the total weight and those from 2018 and 2017 each account for 25 per cent. Excluding salary-related criteria, if only two years of data are available, the weighting is split 60:40 if data are from 2019 and 2018, or 70:30 if from 2019 and 2017. For salary figures, the weighting is 50:50 for two years’ data, to avoid inflation-related distortions.

Information provided by the business schools informs 10 criteria that collectively account for 35 per cent of the final ranking. The corporate social responsibility category is based on the proportion of core courses dedicated to CSR, ethics, social and environmental issues. It carries a weight of 3 per cent.

The weight of the faculty and student gender diversity is 4 per cent. For these gender diversity criteria, schools with a 50:50 (male: female) composition receive the highest score.

The international diversity calculation is based on the overall percentage of students and faculty from abroad as well as the spread of these individuals by citizenship based on the Herfindahl index, a measure of concentration.

The final criterion, the FT research rank, accounts for 10 per cent of the ranking. It is calculated according to the number of articles published by schools’ full-time faculty in 50 internationally recognised academic and practitioner journals. The rank combines the absolute number of publications from January 2016 to July 2019 with the number of publications weighted relative to the faculty’s size.

The FT rankings are relative. Schools are ranked against each other rather than against set standards. The FT calculates the Z-scores for each criterion. (Z-scores show how far a school’s data is from the mean and are unitless, so they allow the ranking to be based on very different criteria — salary, percentages and points.) These scores are then weighted as outlined in the ranking key and added together for a final score.

After removing the schools that did not meet the minimum response rate from their alumni, a first version is calculated using all remaining schools. The school at the bottom is removed and a second version is calculated. This action is repeated to find the top 100.

Judith Pizer of Jeff Head Associates acted as the FT’s database consultant. The FT research rank was calculated using Clarivate Analytics data from the Web of Science, an abstract and citation database of research literature.

Key (weights for ranking criteria are shown in brackets as a percentage of the overall ranking).

Salary today US$ (20): average salary three years after graduation, US$ PPP equivalent.†

Salary increase (20): average salary difference between before the EMBA and now. Half of this figure is calculated according to the absolute salary increase, and half according to the percentage increase relative to the pre-EMBA salary.†

Career progress (5): calculated according to changes in the level of seniority and the size of company alumni work in now, versus before their EMBA.†

Work experience (5): a measure of the pre-EMBA experience of alumni according to the seniority of positions held, number of years in each position, company size and overseas work experience.†

Aims achieved (5): the extent to which alumni fulfilled their goals or reasons for doing an EMBA.†

Female faculty (4): percentage of female faculty.

Female students (4): percentage of female students on the programme.

Women on board (1): percentage of female members on the advisory board.

International faculty (5): calculated according to the diversity of faculty by citizenship and the percentage whose citizenship differs from their country of employment, which is the published figure.

International students (5): the percentage of current students whose country of residence and citizenship differs from the country in which they study (the published figure), as well as their diversity by citizenship.

International board (2): percentage of the board whose citizenship differs from the country in which the business school is situated.

International course experience (5): percentage of classroom teaching hours that are conducted outside the country in which the business school is situated.

Languages (1): number of languages required upon graduation. *Programme not fully available in English.

Faculty with doctorates (5): percentage of full-time faculty with a doctoral degree.

FT research rank (10): calculated according to the number of articles published by a school’s current full-time faculty members in 50 academic and practitioner journals between January 2016 and July 2019. The rank combines the absolute number of publications with the number weighted relative to the faculty’s size.

Corporate social responsibility rank (3): proportion of core courses dedicated to CSR, ethics, social and environmental issues.

For the three gender-related criteria, schools that have 50:50 (male:female) composition receive the highest possible score.

† Includes data for the current year and the one or two preceding years where available.