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On Monday, for the seventh year, the Financial Times published its ranking of Executive MBA programmes, part-time MBA degrees for senior working managers. The FT says if there is one word that sums up the consumer market for Executive MBA programmes these days, it is choice. There is a choice of when you study, where you study and how you study. All of which, you might think, would mean a hugely competitive market with schools in a bare-knuckle fight to enrol the best But this is only partly the case because demand from students is so high, as business schools report an ever-increasing number of applicants. (Article) The most dramatic change in this year's ranking is the plunge in the ranking of the Michael Smurfit Business School at University College Dublin from 48th place in 2006 to a ranking of 88 in 2007. The ranking is compiled using data from two sets of surveys; one is completed by alumni who graduated from the respective programmes three years ago, in 2004, and the other by the business schools. Some 8,000 alumni were contacted for the 2007 ranking and more than 4,000 completed the online questionnaire. The overall response rate was 51 per cent. This year 107 business schools took part in the survey, compared with 104 in 2006. Of these 107 schools, 98 had a sufficient response rate (20 per cent of alumni and a minimum of 20 responses in total) to be considered for the ranking of the top 90 programmes. Data from alumni questionnaires are used to determine positions in five of the 16 criteria that make up the ranking; from “Salary today (US$)” to “Aims achieved rank”. The figures for these five criteria include data collected by the FT over three years. The data collected in 2007 (from the EMBA class that graduated in 2004) carry 50 per cent of the total weight. Data from the 2006 and 2005 rankings are each given 25 per cent of the total weight. If only two years of data are available, the ratio is 60 per cent from this year’s survey and 40 per cent from the 2006 survey. The first four criteria in the table examine the salaries and career progression of alumni from before they started their EMBA to the present day – usually a period of five years. These four contribute 50 per cent of the final score. The salary figure presented in “Salary today (US$)” is calculated in the following way. The FT says to start with, salary data of alumni working in the non-profit and public service sectors, or who are full-time students, are removed. Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rates supplied by the World Bank are then used to convert the remaining salary data to US$ PPP equivalent figures. PPP rates are rates of currency conversion which are applied to iron out differences in purchasing power between currencies, in this case so that alumni salary data can be standardised and compared meaningfully. After this conversion, the highest and lowest salaries are excluded before the average salary is calculated for each school. The data that are shown on the table are the US$ PPP figures. The salary percentage increase, “Salary increase %”, is calculated according to the differences in average salary for each school before alumni started the EMBA and today. The next two criteria measure the career success of alumni before and after the EMBA. “Career progress rank” quantifies changes in the level of seniority and the size of the company in which alumni now work versus before the EMBA. “Work experience rank” takes into account the seniority of alumni, the size of the company they worked for, the length of time they stayed there and any international work experience, all before they began the EMBA. The fifth criterion, “Aims achieved”, assesses the extent to which the school has enabled respondents to fulfil their goals or reasons for doing an EMBA. It carries 5 per cent of the total weighting. The next eight criteria, from “Women Faculty (%)” to “Languages” are calculated using data from the business school survey. They measure the diversity of faculty, board members and EMBA students at each school, and the international reach of the EMBA programme. These criteria contribute 25 per cent of the final rank. Of the final three criteria, two are based on data from the business school survey. The last criterion in the table, “FT research rank”, relates to the number of articles published by faculty members in 40 international academic and practitioner journals. The period for which publications are assessed is January 2004 to 2007. For each publication, a point (or a fraction, if there is more than one author) is awarded to the school where the author is currently employed. The final rank combines the absolute number of publications with the number of publications adjusted for faculty size. After all calculations have been applied to the data for each of the different ranking criteria, Z-scores are applied on a column-by-column basis. That is, for each criterion on the table, a separate set of Z-scores is calculated. Z-scores take into account the differences in score between each school in that column and the spread of scores between the top and bottom school. The Z-scores in each column are then multiplied by the column weights (see table key). The multiplied Z-scores are then added together to give a final score for each school. This is presented as the school’s overall rank for 2007. All the criteria which contribute to the final ranking have underlying Z-scores, but in the table the data are presented as US$ equivalents, ranks, percentages, or in the case of languages, the number of languages required on graduation. Although the headline ranking figures show changes in the data year to year, the pattern of clustering among the schools is equally significant. Some 219 points separate Kellogg/Hong Kong UST Business School at the top, from the two schools ranked number 89. The first ten business schools, from Kellogg/Hong Kong UST to Insead, form the top group of schools. The second group is headed by Purdue/Tias/CEU/GISMA, which would need to increase its score by 11 per cent overall in order to move up a group. Top of the third group is the Robinson College of Business of Georgia State University which is 7 points behind Stockholm School of Economics. Only 40 points separate the top and bottom schools in this third group. © Copyright 2007 by Finfacts.com |
