After a Forbes two-year report, now comes the next business school ranking from Times Higher Education, a British magazine about the state of higher education. Several days ago, they published their 2018 World University Rankings comparing higher educational institutions in the fields of business and economics.
Unsurprisingly, the top spot on the list is taken by Stanford University. The second place belongs to MIT, and the third one (as in the previous year) belongs to the Oxford university. The closest runner-up is London Business School. US schools, namely Harvard and Wharton, have the sixth and ninth places respectively.
Poets and Quants reports that most universities represented in the rankings are British and American. Additionally, some Asian universities are also shown in the top 20 of this list, such as Peking University, Hong Kong University and the National University of Singapore.
The Winners of the 2018 Rankings
Times Higher Education’s rankings may be in many ways similar to American rating lists, seeing how universities like Kellogg, Booth and Berkeley Haas all possess places in the top 10. Still, the techniques behind these ratings sometimes yield unexpected results.
Incidentally, for its 2018 rankings Times Higher Education concentrated on such topics as Business and Management, Accounting and Finance, Business and Economics, and Economics and Econometrics.
To make it clearer, Times Higher Education didn’t count very popular majors like marketing and operations, which may have influenced the results. The rankings on business and economics in these rankings are based on the following criteria:
- Teaching: evaluation of the learning environment (30.9%)
- Research: how important it is and how much money and prestige it brings (32.6%)
- Citations: how often is the university’s research quoted (25%)
- Global outlook: faculty, research and students (9%)
- Income in Industry: innovative potential (2.5%)
For the Business and Economics part, research bears the biggest weight. It can give students new ideas and insights for innovations, but it doesn’t reflect objectively the value of a university in the eyes of students. Actually, the amount of research done at universities benefits PhD students more than future MBAs. For universities heavily into research, teaching is viewed as an annoying burden taking valuable time from science, and it cannot be useful for students. This is how, even at top universities, MBAs are often at a disadvantage with questionable quality of teaching and professors who are always busy with their research and not available to students.
What Else Times Higher Education Rankings Lack
Additionally, important things like the weight of college GPAs and GMATs taken by MBA applicants cannot be found in these new rankings. To this, one can add the employment percentages and first-job pay for graduates. To state it simply, these rankings don’t take into account the goals (career-wise) and skills of future MBAs.
Also, Times Higher Education rankings fail to look into the important question of networking at universities. For MBAs, networking is crucial, as it raises the chances of finding a good job or partnership. Some sources like Access MBA point out that more than half of MBA graduates found their first jobs thanks to networking.
Of course, some of Times Higher Educations’ criteria are very strict: no university can be admitted, if they haven’t published at least 200 papers in the previous five years. Additionally, 5% of the faculty have to work in the discipline for the university to show up in the Business and Economics rankings. However, these criteria create a bias towards institutions more inclined to teaching and with a more diverse faculty.
The new rankings will be useful for MBA students who have a goal to become professors, as they reflect rather clearly the academic quality of universities. Still, many points that are crucial for all other applicants are not present there, especially those concerning jobs and remuneration after graduation.
Meet the representatives from top European business schools on MBA25 event in Baku!
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