The Economist has just revealed its latest 2012 Full time MBA ranking, and it makes for very interesting reading, with, as expected, The Economist's way of doing things making for different results than other famous ranking systems. Every ranking system is full of flaws, for example, critics note that 80% of the Economist's rankings are based on unaudited data submitted by the participating schools. That leaves the door wide open to self-serving submissions that fudge the numbers, according to Harvard.
You can also click on a button to jump to the rankings in your area or country. This blog notes that Japan is not even mentioned as a country in Asia.
The Economist's methodology is here: The Economist ranking of full-time MBA programmes was based on an initial selection of 135 leading business schools around the world. All 135 schools were invited to take part in our two-stage survey, which requires input from schools and students/alumni. Of these, we were unable to rank 17 schools, either because the failed to respond to our survey or did not provide enough data to be ranked. The global top 100 schools were gleaned from the remaining 118. Schools outside the top 100 receive a regional ranking only.
To qualify for inclusion in the ranking, the schools with full-time MBA programmes that responded to our survey had to meet various thresholds of data provision, as well as attaining a minimum number of responses to a survey gauging the opinion of current students and alumni who graduated within the last three years. These were set as a proportion of the annual intake of students to the programme as shown in the table below.
Data were collected during spring 2012 using two web-based questionnaires, one for business schools and one for students and recent graduates. Schools distributed the web address of the latter questionnaire to their own students and graduates. A total of 15,550 students and graduates participated. All data received from schools were subject to verification checks, including, where possible, comparison with historical data, peer schools and other published sources. Student and graduate questionnaires were audited for multiple or false entries.
Memory has been built into the rankings by taking a weighted average of 2012 (50%), 2011 (30%) and 2010 (20%) data to provide a rounded picture of the school. Sudden movements in data, which might not produce an immediate increase in quality, are thus reflected gradually, much as the improvement would affect students.
The table below summarises the measures used to calculate the rankings together with their respective weightings. Salaries were converted at average 2011 exchange rates. Student and alumni ratings make up 20% of the total ranking, and 80% is based on data provided by schools. The statistical methodology adopted for the ranking gives each business school a unique score (known to statisticians as a z-score). Unlike some other rankings, we do not include any “equal” schools (for example, four schools ranked equal sixth followed by one ranked tenth). However, it should be noted that differences between some schools might be slight.
For more details, please see The Economist.
http://www.economist.com/whichmba/full-time-mba-ranking
