FT’s Executive MBA ranking delivers some surprises

The winner was somewhat expected: The joint programme from Kellogg/HKUST has won the top spot for the Financial Times’ Executive MBA ranking for the eighth time. But a new entry took everyone by surprise: The EMBA-Global Asia, delivered by Columbia Business School, London Business School and the University of Hong Kong went all the way up to second spot in its first ever ranking. Sloan School of Management at MIT which also participated for the first time and straight away moved to 11th place.

Kellog HKUST

The Tsinghua University/Insead programme, which ranked first two years ago, came in on third place followed by the EMBA-Global Americas & Europe, the sister programme of EMBA-Global Asia, but delivered by Columbia and LBS only.

Trium, which was number one in 2014, achieved fifth place, another joint programme this time delivered by HEC Paris, LSE and NYU Stern School of Business.

For its Executive MBA ranking, the FT judges the best 100 programmes worldwide. The ranking is based on data collected from the business schools and their alumni who graduated three years before. Most of these EMBA programmes are structured towards high-achieving executives in the workforce. This means participants remain in their job full-time and attend classes once a month or every second month.

CUHK Business School (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) had the most gender-balanced cohort, with 49 per cent female students compared with an average of 29 per cent among the other top 100.

The Swiss school HEC Lausanne was the highest climber, rising 26 places to 70, after it had dropped 13 places the year before.

Melbourne Business School’s EMBA was the only university in Oceania among the top 100 at 60th place and The Gordon Institute of Business Science at the University of Pretoria, ranked 87th, the only representative from Africa.

Executive MBA Ranking 2017

1        Kellogg / HKUST Business School China EMBA

2        EMBA-Global Asia: Columbia/HKU/LBS

3        Tsinghua University / Insead

4        EMBA-Global: Columbia/LBS

5        Trium: HEC Paris / LSE / NYU: Stern

6        Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Antai

7        Washington University: Olin

8        Insead

9        University of Oxford: Saïd

10      ESCP Europe

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Barbara Barkhausen