The most diverse MBA programmes

At business school, students often benefit from the knowledge and experience of their fellow students as much as they profit from the content and the professors they get acquainted with. That’s why it is interesting to look at a business school’s diversity as much as at its scores in the various rankings. Diverse programmes with students from different countries, cultural backgrounds and industries can give you an immense networking boost, particularly if you are interested in global roles, changing industries or working overseas.

Business Insider recently released a ranking of the “25 Most Diverse Business Schools” from GraduatePrograms.com. The website conducted online surveys with over 10,000 current and former graduate business students and used a 1 to 10 scale (with 1 being lowest and 10 being highest) to determine how “diverse” the programmes they attended were.

The top spots also coincided with some of the top performers of some of the well-regarded business school rankings, such as the one from Financial Times or the one published by the Economist: Insead, an international business school with campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi has an exceptionally international outlook and – no surprise here – made it to the top spot. Its student body as well as its faculty comprises of many different nationalities and despite its main school being located in France, the school has less than ten per cent French students and staff. English is the most widely spoken language there, but there is no harm in speaking French or using the opportunity to learn the language.

Insead is followed by Spain’s IE Business School, which hosts students from over 70 countries not least because of its renowned online or blended MBA course that attracts participants from all over the world.

Fellow Spanish business school Esade took out the third place with US-schools UCLA’s Anderson School of Management on fourth and Yale following on number five.

Barbara Barkhausen