FT Executive MBA Ranking 2018

Every year, the Financial Times, one of the world's leading global business dailies, publishes the Executive MBA ranking. In this year's edition, for the third time in a row, the winner is Kellogg-HKUST EMBA from China. In the second place there is Trium Global EMBA, the program run jointly by universities from France, the USA, China and the United Kingdom. And Tsinghua University/ Insead, the program offered by a consortium of several business schools has succeeded in maintaining its third place of last year. In the ranking there is only one project from Poland, the Executive MBA offered by the Kozminski University, Warsaw. In this year's edition it is in 74th place (last year 68th).

Ranking methodology

Every programme may participate in the FT ranking. However, EMBA programmes must meet certain criteria to be eligible. First the school has to be accredited by either the US’s Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business or the European Equis, to have a suitable group structure (a group of participants must study and finish the program at the same time), and to demonstrate a minimum number of 30 graduates in a given year.
Like in the previous editions, the latest list has been created based on two surveys. One of them was filled by universities and programme organizers, and the other - by alumni who graduated from programmes. The questionnaires received from schools allowed the daily to examine some factors related to the quality of the programme and the level and dynamics of university growth, as well as the international faculty, the number of women in teaching staff, the international range of the programme, the number and quality of research conducted by the university or the number of publications. In turn, alumni responses informed the following ranking criteria: salary today, salary increase, career progress, work experience and aims achieved.

Ranking results

The analysis of the ranking results shows that the programmes run by Chinese universities have recently dominated the environment of the Executive MBA studies across the world. In ten top of this year's ranking there are as many as 7 programmes of Chinese business schools, carried out alone or jointly with the world's leading universities, and in the entire ranking there are up to 17 EMBA programmes from China. For comparison, last year there were 15 of them. Interestingly, the first independent programme coming from Europe took 6th place (HEC Paris International EMBA), and American - 10th place (MIT: Sloan). Based on the results of the ranking, it can be clearly stated that the programmes offered jointly by consortia of several universities are still very popular. In the list of ten top there are 5, and in the entire ranking - up to 23.

Programmes from Poland in the Executive MBA ranking

There is only one Executive MBA programme from Poland, which is run by the Kozminski University, Warsaw. This year it is ranked in 74th place (68th in 2017).

Conclusions

The results of the ranking show, apart from universities in the USA, Chinese business schools also put a lot of emphasis on managerial education and decide to conduct Executive MBA studies at a high level and standard. It is also worth emphasizing that universities provide a wide range of international programmes, whose courses take place in different locations around the world. Currently, managers do not see any problems moving around the world if they can gain new knowledge and exchange their experiences with the others.

Full ranking results are available here: