2009 Financial Times MBA Rankings

The Financial Times has just released its 2009 business school rankings, with Wharton and London Business School sharing the top spot.

There were a couple of notable milestones in this year's FT rankings. LBS reached the #1 slot for the first time, breaking Wharton and Harvard Business School's joint stranglehold on the #1 slot. Also notable was that for the first time an Asian business school cracked the top ten -- Shanghai-based China European International Business School (CEIBS) came in at #8. Joining CEIBS in the top twenty were two other schools from Asia: The Indian School of Business ranked at #15, and the Hong Kong UST Business School was ranked #16.

You can see the full Financial Times rankings here. To learn what it takes to get into the world's top business schools, visit Veritas Prep's MBA Application Resources page.

BusinessWeek MBA Rankings for 2008

This just in! In an online chat, BusinessWeek has just revealed its 2008 business school rankings. Without further ado, here are the top 25 U.S. MBA programs for 2008:

1. Chicago (Booth)
2. Harvard Business School
3. Northwestern (Kellogg)
4. Penn (Wharton)
5. Michigan (Ross)
6. Stanford
7. Columbia
8. Duke (Fuqua)
9. MIT (Sloan)
10. UC Berkeley (Haas)
11. Cornell (Johnson)
12. Dartmouth (Tuck)
13. NYU (Stern)
14. UCLA (Anderson)
15. Indiana (Kelley)
16. Virginia (Darden)
17. UNC (Kenan-Flagler)
18. Southern Methodist (Cox)
19. Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
20. Notre Dame(Mendoza)
21. UT Austin (McCombs)
22. BYU (Marriott)
23. Emory (Goizueta)
24. Yale
25. USC (Marshall)

And here are the top ten MBA programs outside of the United States:

1. Queen's School of Business
2. IE Business School
3. INSEAD
4. Western Ontario (Ivey)
5. London Business School
6. ESADE
7. IMD
8. Toronto (Rotman)
9. IESE
10. Oxford (Said)

U.S. News and BusinessWeek vie for the title of most closely watched business schools rankings. While it's debatable as to whether the BusinessWeek MBA ranking system or the U.S. News ranking system is more valid, the fact that BW's rankings only come out every two years always makes this announcement a little extra exciting. To its credit, BusinessWeek does a good job of building up the drama with its online chat format for announcing their business school rankings.

For more help with the business school application process, take a look at Veritas Prep's MBA admissions consulting services.

Veritas Prep Featured in Inside Higher Ed

Inside Higher Ed, one of the leading voices on matters related to the higher education space, recently turned to Veritas Prep for insights on the competition among business schools in trying to outshine one another in the rankings. Chad Troutwine and I recently were in Washington, D.C., and we had a chance to sit down with Inside Higher Ed's Jack Stripling to discuss trends affecting the world's top MBA programs.

Stripling's article ("A Farewell to Arms Races?") investigates what drives schools to roll out new academic programs, enhance their facilities, or make other significant changes. While there seemed to be a more blatant trend of schools "keeping up with the Joneses" in the 80's and 90's, many top schools seem to have taken a step back and are now making more deliberate changes that are in line with their core missions.

But the buzzwords of the day (be it ethics a few years ago or global business today) still seem to drive some of today's changes at top MBA programs, which is what Chad and I discussed with Jack.

Take a look... Inside Higher Ed is a great way to stay on top of these trends if you're considering applying to any graduate program.