2 Business Schools in Europe Make Top-10 Ranking

For the first time, two European universities have placed in the top 10 of full-time M.B.A. programs, according to annual rankings published last month by the Financial Times, a British newspaper.

The list shows that Europe’s leading business schools are catching up with their U.S. counterparts, the Financial Times reported. The M.B.A. was introduced in Europe only about 40 years ago, some 60 years after the first such degree was established, at Dartmouth College.

The University of London’s London Business School and Insead, an independent institute in Fontainebleau, near Paris, made it into the top 10 in the M.B.A. 2000 list. Only the London Business School reached the top 10 in 1999.

The Financial Times’s top 10, in descending order: Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, London Business School, Insead, and Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.

A total of 106 schools around the world were invited to participate in the survey. Eighty-five met the criteria for inclusion: a full-time M.B.A. program that has been running for at least three years, and a return rate of at least 20 percent on a questionnaire mailed to alumni. The ranking was compiled from two questionnaires: one from the business school itself, and one from its class of 1996. An independent assessment of the schools’ research also was conducted.

The position of a school in the ranking was determined by its performance in categories covering three broad areas: value and quality of the M.B.A. and, in particular, how high a new graduate’s salary was; diversity; and research. The specific categories included graduates’ international mobility, their career progress, the schools’ number of female students and of international faculty members, and the European and North American salaries earned by graduates.

http://chronicle.com Section: International Page: A53