Fortuna Admissions has compiled the results of the big five MBA rankings of the last 12 months to produce the Fortuna Ranking of MBA Rankings 2012 – US Business Schools.
How do the top business schools in the US perform when you combine these results?
Methodology
Only the US business schools are ranked by all five major media rankings. Fortuna has calculated their overall performance by looking at each ranking position compared to other US schools, and taking an average of those results divided by five.
In the case of the FT and Economist rankings, if a US business school ranked #45 in the overall FT ranking and #40 in the overall Economist ranking, but among U.S. business schools was #23 in the FT and #15 in The Economist, then the relative US regional figure was used for the calculation, and added to those of BusinessWeek, Forbes and US News, before dividing by five to achieve an average score.
The idea of the Fortuna Ranking of MBA Rankings is to compare the performance of schools in multiple rankings, and therefore does not include the many good US business schools that appear in fewer than four rankings.
Candidates should remember that this is not scientific approach, and there is no attempt to weight any one ranking greater than the others. As stated before, each ranking uses a different methodology and measures different things with the inherent limitations of each assessment, so doing particularly well in one ranking and less well in another is reflected in the overall average score.
Matt Symonds is Co-founder and Director of Fortuna Admissions, and bestselling author of Getting the MBA Admissions Edge, sponsored by McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, BCG and Bain.