The FT surveys alumni three years after graduation so the programs must be four years old. For schools to enter the ranking calculations, the FT requires that a minimum of 20 per cent of alumni reply to the survey, with at least 20 fully completed responses.
This ranking uses data collected from the schools and the 9,000 alumni who completed a full-time MBA at them in 2013 — a response rate of 41 per cent.
The ranking has 20 different criteria. Alumni responses inform eight criteria that together contribute 59 per cent of its weight. Eleven criteria are calculated from school data, accounting for 31 per cent of the final ranking. KPMG audits a number of schools every year. The remaining criterion, the research rank, counts for 10 per cent.
Alumni-informed criteria are based on the data collected in the past three years. Responses from the 2017 survey carry 50 per cent of total weight and those from 2016 and 2015, 25 per cent each. Excluding salary criteria, if only two years of data are available, the weighting is split 60:40 if data are from 2017 and 2016, or 70:30 if they are from 2017 and 2015. For salary figures, the weighting is 50:50 for two years’ data.
The first two alumni criteria are average income three years after graduation and salary increase compared with pre-MBA salary, both weighted at 20 per cent. For the latter, half of the weight applies to the absolute increase and half to the percentage rise (published). Salaries are converted to US dollars using October 2016 International Monetary Fund purchasing power parity rates.
The salaries of non-profit and public sector workers and full-time students are removed, as are the highest and lowest salaries from each school, to calculate a normalized average. Finally, salaries are weighted to reflect differences between different sectors.
“Value for money” for each school is calculated by dividing their average alumni salary three years after graduation by their MBA’s total cost, including tuition, opportunity cost and other expenses. Any financial help given to alumni is subtracted from the total.
The school criteria include the diversity of staff, board members, students by gender, nationality and the MBA’s international reach. For gender criteria, schools with a 50:50 composition score highest.
With the exception of the “PhD graduates” category, criteria based on school data use 2017 information only.
The research rank is based on the number of articles by full-time faculty in 50 internationally recognised academic and practitioner journals. The rank combines the number of publications from January 2014 to October 2016, with the number weighted relative to faculty size. The list of journals used for this criterion was updated and increased from 45 to 50, following a consultation with business schools in June 2016.
The FT Global MBA ranking is a relative listing. Schools are ranked against each other by calculating a Z-score for each criterion. The Z-score is a statistic that shows where a score lies in relation to the mean. 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 response rate threshold from the alumni survey, a first version is calculated using all remaining schools. The school at the bottom is removed and a second version is calculated and so on until we reach the top 100. The top 100 schools are ranked accordingly to produce the 2017 list.
