Financial Times Ranking: January 2012

Today the Financial Times released its annual ranking of global MBA programs. This year we are ranked 44th worldwide, which is an improvement of two positions, and 20th in North America, up three spots.

We have also improved our performance against the peer set of large, research-intensive, globally-relevant business schools, which also have large MBA classes. (See the list below) Against this peer group, which we established four years ago, we improved our position to 19th, which is our highest yet. Within this group, we are fourth on the list for publicly-funded schools (italicized) as the big US private schools still dominate with 11 of the top 14 positions.

I am happy that we rank among the top twenty schools worldwide that have chosen to make a contribution to business knowledge through their support of faculty research and that simultaneously maintain significantly sized MBA programs. This is the most important category of business schools worldwide and Canada deserves to have a business school that is globally significant in this category.

As for our overall ranking, it is still challenged by the increase in the number of small EMBA-sized programs at schools who also largely do not focus on the creation of business knowledge. Higher-ranked schools such as AGSM, IMD, Ceibs, Manchester and IIM-Ahmedabad, with research rankings of 66, 76, 81, 81 and 94, respectively, play in a fundamentally different market in which we have no interest in competing.

On the research front, we are particularly pleased to have cracked the top 10 overall. There are a couple of things to note. First it is nice to be tied for 10th in research with none other than this year's top-ranked Stanford Graduate School of Business. I think that is undeniable evidence that we have a world-class faculty. Second, our progress has been nothing short of spectacular. Ten years ago, we ranked 58th in research and Stanford 4th. And closer to home, ten years ago, Ivey was Canada's research leader, ranking 35th to our 58th. Ivey's rank is now 44th compared our 10th, which is a striking reversal of positions. Congratulations to our faculty members for their research success and to Vice-Dean Peter Pauly and Associate Dean Joel Baum for their leadership in building our faculty.

I was also happy with substantial improvement in some of the career-oriented factors, including substantial improvements in Salary Increase (highest among Canadian schools), Value for Money and Aims Achieved. There is as always lots of room for improvement, but I am pleased with our progress towards being recognized as one of the world's top tier business schools.

The complete results are online at:

http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-rankings-2012

Roger