Guides · figures from each school’s own report
MBA rankings: what each table measures
Four publishers rank MBA programs every year, and each answers a different question; this page reads their methods, not their order.
Best fit for any industry (whole class), on your salary
Wharton
87% of the class (about 773 graduates) · $185,000 · payback 3.9 years
Fit score: share of the class (40%), salary (30%) and ten-year NPV for you (30%), each as a percentile among the schools shown. Schools under 0% of the class are not ranked. Method.
| # | School | Share | About | Salary | Payback | 10-year NPV | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | WhartonPhiladelphia · 21 months | 87% | 773 | $185,000 | 3.9 years | $312,208 | 91 |
| 2 | UVA DardenCharlottesville · 21 months | 89.3% | 322 | $175,000 | 4.1 years | $257,290 | 87 |
| 3 | Chicago BoothChicago · 21 months | 87.8% | 558 | $175,000 | 4.1 years | $260,413 | 85 |
| 4 | ColumbiaNew York · 20 months | 90.4% | 888 | $175,000 | 4.5 years | $223,915 | 85 |
| 5 | MIT SloanCambridge · 21 months | 87.1% | 377 | $175,000 | 4.2 years | $245,659 | 82 |
| 6 | HarvardBoston · 21 months | 84% | 792 | $185,000 | 4.0 years | $300,068 | 82 |
| 7 | Dartmouth TuckHanover · 21 months | 87% | 264 | $175,000 | 4.3 years | $234,883 | 79 |
| 8 | KelloggEvanston · 21 months | 85.5% | 457 | $175,000 | 4.3 years | $241,009 | 76 |
| 9 | Stanford GSBStanford · 21 months | 81% | 352 | $185,000 | 4.0 years | $296,469 | 74 |
| 10 | NYU SternNew York · 21 months | 86% | 289 | $175,000 | 4.7 years | $194,432 | 72 |
| 11 | Emory GoizuetaAtlanta · 21 months | 81.7% | 105 | $175,000 | 3.9 years | $282,532 | 70 |
| 12 | Michigan RossAnn Arbor · 21 months | 84.3% | 319 | $170,000 | 4.2 years | $236,467 | 69 |
| 13 | Cornell JohnsonIthaca · 21 months | 83% | 229 | $175,000 | 4.5 years | $220,137 | 67 |
| 14 | Berkeley HaasBerkeley · 21 months | 84.1% | 230 | $167,250 | 4.5 years | $196,335 | 64 |
| 15 | Yale SOMNew Haven · 21 months | 79.9% | 293 | $175,000 | 4.3 years | $234,097 | 59 |
Share: % of the graduating class (or of those who accepted a job) the school reports for this goal. About: that share applied to the class size. * no salary published for this goal: school-wide figure. Salaries in US dollars at the ECB rate of the last update; “average” marks a mean where the school publishes no median.
Placing graduates here but not ranked: AGSM UNSW 87% (no salary published) · Alliance MBS 94% (no salary published) · CEIBS 90% (no living budget published) · EDHEC 84% (no salary published) · Esade 90% (no salary published) · Fudan 94.4% (no salary published) · HKUST 95% (no salary published) · IESE 80% (no salary published) · IIM Ahmedabad PGPX 96.4% (no living budget published) · IIM Lucknow IPMX 92.6% (no living budget published) · Nanyang (NTU) 93% (no salary published) · NUS 93% (no living budget published) · Rice Jones 71.3% (no living budget published) · SDA Bocconi 79% (no living budget published) · SKK GSB 93% (no salary published) · SMU 80% (no salary published) · USC Marshall 71% (no living budget published) · WashU Olin 78% (no living budget published).
Built by Radif Partners · figures checked · Method · Editorial policy
The four MBA rankings most applicants read measure different things. The Financial Times Global MBA ranking 2026 lists 100 schools on criteria grouped into career progression (salary today, weighted salary, salary increase, career progress, aims achieved, employment at three months), programme assessment, diversity, international opportunities and faculty research. US News ranks American full-time programs only: 50% on employment rates and pay of the 2024 and 2025 graduates, 25% on ratings by deans and recruiters, 25% on test scores, grades and acceptance rate. Bloomberg Businessweek's 2026-27 edition weighs four indexes from surveys of students, alumni and employers, with compensation at 40.6% for American schools. QS combines employer opinion, return on investment and other indicators. None of these tables starts from your salary. Our own ranking orders schools on one goal at a time, using the share of the class placed in it (40%), the salary reported for it (30%) and the ten-year value of the degree (30%), all read in each school's employment report.
Financial Times: alumni careers and an international view
The FT Global MBA ranking 2026 lists 100 schools, and its own table shows what goes into the score. The largest group is career progression: the salary of alumni today, the same salary weighted by the FT, the percentage increase compared with pay before the MBA, career progress, whether alumni achieved their aims, the careers service and the share employed three months after graduation. Programme assessment adds value for money, ESG and net zero teaching and overall satisfaction. A diversity block counts women and international members among faculty, students and the board, plus a sector diversity rank; international opportunities cover mobility and course experience; faculty expertise covers doctorates and the FT research rank. An alumni network rank and a carbon footprint rank also appear.
Two features matter when reading it. The salary measures describe alumni (the table calls the first one "salary today"), not graduates at the time of their first offer, so they reward schools whose alumni rise fast after leaving. And the salary increase rewards schools whose students earned little before, which lifts programs in countries with lower pre-MBA pay. Neither measure tells you what you, with your own salary, would gain.
US News: outcomes, reputation and selectivity, American schools only
The US News methodology for its Best Business Schools ranking is the most explicit of the four. Attainment success weighs 50%: employment rate at graduation (7%) and three months after (13%), mean starting salary and bonus (20%) and salary by profession compared with the average of ranked schools (10%), all on the graduates of 2024 and 2025 who were seeking a job. Quality assessment weighs 25%, split between a peer score from deans and directors of accredited programs (12.5%) and a recruiter score (12.5%), each on a scale from 1 to 5. Student selectivity weighs the last 25%: median GMAT and GRE scores (13%), median undergraduate grades (10%) and acceptance rate (2%). The publisher says the indicators and weights are the same as in the two prior editions, and schools in the bottom 10% appear in a range rather than with a number.
A quarter of the score therefore measures who gets in, not what happens after, and a quarter measures opinion. The salary is a mean that includes the signing bonus, a different figure from the median base salary most school reports put first.
Bloomberg Businessweek: weights set by the people surveyed
The Bloomberg Businessweek methodology for its 2026-27 Best B-Schools ranking asks students, alumni and recruiters which factors matter most and turns their answers into the weights of four indexes. For American schools, compensation weighs 40.6%, learning 26.6%, networking 21.3% and entrepreneurship 11.4%; schools in Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Canada have their own weights. The compensation index combines employment and salary data that schools submit under the CSEA standards (52.5% of the index) with survey answers (47.5%). The edition drew on 4,842 students, 7,861 alumni and 617 employers and ranked 98 schools. Non-American salaries were converted into dollars at an average exchange rate and not adjusted for purchasing power.
QS: a methodology we could not read
QS publishes a Global MBA ranking and describes its method on its own site. On the day we checked, that page refused our reader, and we write nothing about a method we have not read on its source. Read it there before giving its rank any weight in your choice.
How much of the class a salary figure describes
Share of the class behind the salary
68%
| Graduates behind the figure | 272 |
| Not seeking (sponsored, start-ups, studies) | 80 |
Sponsored students and founders are usually out of the salary count.
Why their tables are not reproduced here
A published rank is the answer to the publisher's question, with weights the publisher or its surveys chose. Someone aiming at private equity in New York and someone aiming at a manufacturing job in Germany would weigh research output, board diversity or test scores very differently, and a single order cannot serve both. The tables also belong to their publishers. A school page on this site may cite one rank as a fact, with a link to the source, and 56 school pages do so for the FT; no table, column or "top ten" on this site follows a publisher's order.
How our ranking works instead
Our ranking starts from your goal and from documents each school publishes. For a goal such as consulting, investment banking or working in Asia, each school gets three measures from its own employment report: the share of the class placed there, the salary reported for it and the ten-year net present value of the degree for the same person earning $90,000 today. Each measure becomes a percentile among the schools that publish all three, weighted 40%, 30% and 30%. For the whole class, 40 schools can be ranked and 35 are listed apart, most because they publish no salary or no living budget. The method page gives every formula, the finder recomputes the order on your own salary, and the overall ranking shows the result for the reference person.