Financial Times Releases its 2010 Global MBA Rankings

The Financial Times has released its 2010 Global MBA Rankings. The ranking primarily focuses on employability and alumni success, with some weight given to research and faculty. Each school score is based on a combination of business school and alumni surveys that include questions about salaries, career development, the percentage of graduates who are employed three months after graduation, and the percentage of women faculty.

Top 10 FT Global MBA Programs 2010

1. London Business School
2. The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania)
3. Harvard Business School
4. Stanford Graduate School of Business
5. INSEAD
6. Columbia Business School
6. IE Business School
8. MIT Sloan School of Management
9. Booth School of Business (University of Chicago)
10. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Business School

The United States continues to dominate the FT Global MBA Rankings: 56 of the top 100 MBA programs are located in the United States. Europe comes in second with 26 business schools (17 of which are located in the United Kingdom) and Asia and Australia third with seven. In the top 10, six are located in the United States, three in the top five alone.

The importance of rankings in a prospective student's admissions process has long been a topic of debate for business schools and industry experts. In a FT article accompanying the new MBA rankings, Michael Cohan of MBAPrepAdvantage (an MBA admissions consultant) notes that rankings are most helpful at the very beginning of your school research because they give you a broad overview of the programs available. "The rankings put all the schools in one place and signal which programmes have the best reputation," Cohan tells FT. "They also help you get a feel for a school's selectivity: the median Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) scores that a school requires, the grade point average of students and years of work experience."

That said, when looking at any school rankings, be sure to examine the methodology. Rankings are based on a variety of different factors, such as career development, faculty research, peer assessment or employer assessment. They can also have different requirements for consideration, such as location, accreditation and age. On its blog today, mbaMission (another MBA admissions consultant) says: it's important that prospective students "critically evaluate the rankings themselves and determine what is being measured and if it is relevant to you." With the right perspective, you can put all the different rankings to the best use in your MBA search.