How do you measure the impact and value of an MBA program? There’s no perfect way, to be sure. But we’ve spent the past few years thinking about it and using feedback from business schools to create what we believe is the best entrepreneurship-focused ranking on the market.
For four years now, we’ve been ranking full-time MBA programs for entrepreneurship. After implementing our biggest methodological changes since the start of the ranking last year, this year we kept it exactly the same.
Each year we make our survey and methodology available to schools in a Google document and ask them to provide feedback. We then consider all comments and suggestions and make changes based on what we believe will improve the value of the ranking to our readers and business schools. Like last year, in 2022 we included 16 data points with weights ranging from 15% to 2.5%.
A MORE WELL-ROUNDED & IMPROVED METHODOLOGY
The changes we made last year provided a well-rounded methodology and ranking that measures many parts of the entrepreneurial experience. Like previous years, the two heaviest-weighted categories are the average percentage of MBAs launching businesses during B-school or immediately after, and the percentage of MBA elective courses that are 100% focused on entrepreneurship and/or innovation.
Some of the other higher-weighted categories include data looking at the number of members of the school’s main entrepreneurship club; incubator or accelerator space available to MBAs; entrepreneurs in residence available to MBAs; and startup award money available to MBAs. This year we added such data points into the methodology as the percentage of MBAs joining early-stage startups in their first jobs after B-school, the percentage of MBA faculty actively involved in a startup outside of the school, and the number of mentors available to MBAs.
We use ratios and percentages for all metrics used in the methodology. We do this to get a sense of what resources are like for individual students.
37 SCHOOLS RANKED THIS YEAR
This year, 37 schools in total were ranked. That’s down from 38 last year.
This year’s methodology:
FULL TRANSPARENCY: ALL DATA AND METHODOLOGY IS AVAILABLE
Other publications with entrepreneurship rankings focusing on business schools include U.S. News, The Princeton Review, and The Financial Times. All have their flaws. The U.S. News ranking, similar to their undergraduate business school rankings, is not much more than a popularity contest. Deans and senior faculty are asked to rate programs on a one-to-five scale. The Princeton Review uses a convoluted and bogged-down methodology that considers raw numbers instead of accounting for program size, which greatly favors larger schools with more graduates. And The Financial Times isn’t much more than an extension of the alumni survey FT uses for its actual MBA rankings.
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