As the 2020–2021 business school application season continues amid the coronavirus outbreak, some unusual MBA rankings have been released. The Economist published its 2021 full-time MBA ranking recently with a decidedly different top ten in comparison to previous years, largely a result of the lack of comparative data available. This week, the Financial Times (FT) released its 2021 global MBA ranking, based on data from more than 140 schools worldwide. Because the pandemic caused many schools and publications to suspend their data gathering in 2020, such typically prominent schools as the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania are not included in the FT list this year.
Most of the top-ranked schools this year, however, have been included in the top ten in previous years as well: INSEAD, which has campuses in France, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and San Francisco, is in the top spot this year compared to fourth in 2020. London Business School, which was seventh in 2020, stands at second this year. Notably, half of the schools in the top ten are located outside the United States—IESE Business School, which was 13th in 2020, is now fourth; China Europe International Business School (perhaps better known as CEIBS), was fifth in 2020 and is seventh in 2021; and HEC Paris was ninth last year and shares the seventh spot with CEIBS this time. FT has also ranked highly such U.S.-based schools as the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (third), the Yale School of Management (sharing fourth with IESE), the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (sixth), the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University (ninth), and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (tenth).