CEO Magazine MBA Rankings 2020: Who Comes Top?

CEO Magazine has published their rankings of full-time, online and executive MBA programs.

Cass Business School has been ranked as the best place to study an executive MBA in the world, while EU Business School tops their online MBA table.

Full-time MBA programs aren’t ranked but are instead split into tiers, with both Cass and EU Business School featuring in their selection of ‘tier one’ institutions.

Methodologies

CEO Magazine use the following data points to rank full-time MBA programs:

• Quality of faculty: 34.95 percent
• International diversity: 9.71 percent
• Class size: 9.71 percent
• Accreditation: 8.74 percent
• Faculty to student ratio: 7.76 percent
• Price: 5.83 percent
• International exposure: 4.85 percent
• Work experience: 4.85 percent
• Professional development: 4.85 percent
• Gender parity: 4.85 percent
• Delivery methods: 3.8 percent

There are then slight changes to this methodology for the executive and online rankings. The executive MBA ranking adjusts the weighting for work experience and international diversity, while online MBA removes the indicators for delivery methods and class size.

This methodology is notably different from those used in the QS Global MBA Rankings, QS Executive MBA Rankings and QS Online MBA Rankings. Unsurprisingly, this means there are several differences between the CEO Magazine and QS rankings when you look at the top-ranked schools.

Executive MBA

When comparing CEO Magazine’s Executive MBA ranking with its QS equivalent, you can see there are no identical institutions in the top 10. Wharton is the top-ranked executive MBA program according to QS, yet it’s nowhere to be seen in the CEO Magazine top 10.

What does the QS ranking do differently? Well, the QS EMBA Rankings 2019 combines input from thought leaders in business & management alongside the perceptions of global employers who recruit from the world’s best EMBA programs, and is further enhanced by program-specific indicators.

The QS EMBA Rankings methodology is split as follows: 30 percent for employer index; 25 percent for thought leadership; 20 percent career outcome; 15 percent for executive profile; and 10 percent for diversity.

Online MBA

The top 10 of CEO Magazine’s Online MBA Rankings again has nothing in common with the QS Online MBA Rankings.

The QS Online MBA Rankings 2019 focuses on 40 programs from across the world that were assessed through four indicators.

• Student Profile: 35 percent
• Employability: 30 percent
• Faculty and Teaching: 30 percent
• Class Experience: 5 percent

Although there aren’t identical matches in the two top 10s – both CEO Magazine and QS’s Online MBA rankings both featured an online program from an institution with roots in Spain (IE Business School in QS’s case).

Interestingly, the majority of the top 10 in the QS online rankings are schools based in either the US (three) or the UK (four), while CEO Magazine has a greater geographical spread, featuring four institutions in Switzerland, two in New Zealand and two in Australia – shaking up the status quo.