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MBA Wire Taps 476: Financial Times Ranking and Wharton’s Team-Based Discussion · Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. I'm Graham Richmond and this is your Wiretaps for Monday, February 23, 2026. Looking for an MBA experience where you're truly seen, supported and inspired to grow at Vanderbilt Business. You'll discover a personalized learning environment that elevates your potential and turns ambition into action. Whether you're switching careers or accelerating your current path, the Vanderbilt MBA offers a customizable curriculum, exceptional outcomes and a community committed to your success. Propel your future with a program invested in who you are and who you're becoming. Vanderbilt is waiving their $200 application fee for MBA Wiretaps listeners. To learn more about the Vanderbilt MBA program and to claim your application fee waiver, visit Business Vanderbilt. Edu clearadmit. I'm joined by Alex Brown from Cornwall, England. How are things going this week, Alex?
• 1:09
  Speaker B: Very good, thank you, Graeme.
• 1:11
  Speaker A: So we've got kind of a special episode this week. We're going to do a little bit about the Wharton team based discussion since many of our listeners are likely prepping for that process following invites going out and stuff. But then we're also going to do a de dive into the 2026 Financial Times global MBA ranking. And because all that stuff's going to take some time, we'll just do candidates next week. So Alex, but what's going on? Give us your usual rundown. Like, I know last week was kind of a busy week, right?
• 1:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean last week was busy because Sloan actually rolled out its interview invites and we were, we were, we were quite interested whether Sloan would get, get theirs out sooner than Wharton this season, which, which they've managed to do.
• 1:53
  Speaker A: And, and that might be a first.
• 1:55
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I, I don't remember that happening before, quite honestly. But then Wharton too, I mean, we're hoping Wharton rolls them out. We're recording this before Friday, but they're scheduled to have rolled them out Friday, so. So a busy week with interview invites. These are the last two top programs to release that release decisions all at once to roll them out. So, so the next couple of three or be schools trickling interview invites out, but the, the big releases will, will have now concluded.
• 2:28
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I, you know, I wonder if MIT got their invites out faster this year because they've, you know, they're using AI to read all the apps or something. I don't know, they're, they somehow leapfrogged Wharton for the first time. I don't ever remember them being ahead of Wharton.
• 2:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, let's just be clear. We we do not think.
• 2:45
  Speaker A: No, I'm just joking.
• 2:46
  Speaker B: Sloan.
• 2:47
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, in fact, I know they still have live admissions team members over there. I've talked to some of. No, but in any event, yeah, so lots to do there. And you know, both of these schools actually have fairly unique interview processes, you know, with MIT requiring an additional essay to be written prior to the interview, if memory serves, and, and Wharton with the team base. So we'll get into Wharton, but I first want to do a little bit of housekeeping. I want to just remind people we have some exciting events coming up. So this week, let's see, on February 24th and 25th, that's Tuesday and Wednesday of this week at noon Eastern, we've got Masters in Management events. These are college students or people with, you know, maybe one or two years of work experience. We're looking to kind of go and get a Master's in management. And we're going to sit down on Tuesday and Wednesday with Tepper, Chicago Booth, Johns Hopkins, Memory, INSEAD, Georgetown, MI, UC Irvine and UNC Kenan Flagler. So lots of major kind of Masters in Management offerings in the States and over in Europe with INSEAD. We're also on March 19, it's about a month away now, a little less than a month away. We're going to sit down with 14 of the top MBA programs in the United States to do an event called designed for the world, the Global Advantage of a US mba. I am super excited about this. I've been putting together all the content for it. And we've got an immigration lawyer who's going to talk about immigration stuff. We've got career services directors, admissions directors, current students, alumni. So it's going to be a really interesting group of three panels about different elements of kind of coming to the US to do an MBA. And last but not least, Alex, on May 11th in Atlanta we're having our annual MBA fair. The list of schools joining that is growing and it's an in person event for prospective students. So come hang out with us in Atlanta. It's a Monday night, May 11, so come for the weekend, stay for the Monday. Come to our fair. It'll be so much fun. We'll have Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Chicago, Kellogg, Berkeley. There are many other schools that have signed up. So come and join us then. That's up on the website. All of these events you can register for@clearadmit.com event. Alex, anything else on your mind before we kind of dive in and talk a little bit about the team based discussion?
• 5:00
  Speaker B: No, I just Want to reaffirm the event in Atlanta. Should be fantastic. It's the third such event that we've hosted that we'll be hosting. Right. Three years on the spin in different cities, but live event with all the top programs. I got to speculate that this is the only event where all the top programs get together live in person. I might be wrong, but for applicant facing event, I think that's probably the case.
• 5:30
  Speaker A: I think so.
• 5:30
  Speaker B: And the global webinar that you're planning I think is a must attend for any potential international student. Yeah, I'm really excited to learn a lot from the content that you're developing, but also obviously the interaction from that event. So yeah, so I think those, those two events are absolutely outstanding.
• 5:55
  Speaker A: Yeah, I can't wait. And so with all that good news out of the way, we're going to spend the rest of the episode talking about two things that you're not a big fan of. I didn't realize when we, when we paired these two topics. I'm now realizing like you're not a huge fan of Wharton's team based discussion, which you'll explain, but you also aren't a big fan of the FT Global NBA ranking. So this is going to be a fun, fun episode. But why don't we talk Wharton TBD a little bit? I mean for people who apply to Wharton and make it phase where they're invited to an interview, it's a very unusual process in that you don't have a kind of traditional interview. Instead you are put into a team of five or six people. You're given a kind of TBD prompt which you get in advance and you have to kind of prepare for. And then your goal is to come in and discuss that prompt or your thoughts on that prompt in a group setting. And it lasts, you know, about a half an hour I think, if memory serves. And then afterwards you have a kind of quick one on one with one of the. There's usually two observers of the team based discussion. So you have a quick one on one with one of the observers in which they talk to you a little bit about how you think it went. And sometimes they ask you general questions about your background or your kind of plans for like why Wharton, what are your goals, et cetera. So that's like 30,000ft summary, Alex. But do you want to talk a little bit about this? I mean, do you have a sense as to sort of why they do it this way? I mean it really is unorthodox and they've been doing it this way for more than 10 years now. But other schools have not jumped into the fray and done it this way, but Wharton does it this way. And what do you think the rationale is?
• 7:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, Ross, I think had a go at it for a year or two, but seemed to have abandoned this approach. But yeah, I think it's difficult because I mean, they're trying to emulate or mimic the team based sort of learning environment at Wharton, which is absolutely fantastic. You were on a learning team there, Graham. I'm sure you can speak very eloquently about the advantages of that and so forth, but I think when you're putting folks in a team where there is, you know, undermined by a little bit of competition because they're all competing for spaces at Wharton after the fact, it creates a little bit of a different dynamic. But I will say it's probably as AI proof as any admissions process different schools adopt. Right. It's quite difficult to use AI tools in preparation. We know that, Graham, because we can't simulate this on our MBA simulator tool, which frankly I'd say has been quite popular for many other programs like Booth is leading the way right now for, for simulated interviews on that tool. But anyway, that's completely beside the buy besides the point. But this is Wharton's process and it's really important for candidates to be super familiar with how to best prepare for the team based discussion and to do their best. I know we've run a podcast on this team based discussion in October. You'll talk about that in a minute. And I know our partner, Leland, if that's how you pronounce it, will be hosting mock team based discussion. So. So hopefully we've got plenty of resources to help folks prepare. Graham?
• 9:29
  Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And you're referring to an episode that aired in November, early November of 2025. It was episode number 4 54. So if you have a Wharton interview, go back and listen to that episode because we do a deep dive into the whole team based discussion. And just as a refresher, I mean, for people who are curious this year, the prompt that Wharton is giving everyone is you're tasked with designing a new leadership intensive for Wharton's McNulty Leadership Program. You have $25,000 as like a pilot budget and you know, they're not judging whether your idea is like brilliant or even, you know, totally realistic. It's more about how you and your teammates approach an open ended sort of question and bring ideas to the group. As a reminder, these are all done virtually so you don't have to get in a room with these people, but it's a virtual thing, which I think is good because it allows them to really mix and match people from different locations. Whereas before when they would do these team based discussions, they would go to parts of the world to conduct them, some on campus, obviously, but then they would do hub cities like in India or they would go to Hong Kong or Tokyo, they'd go to these different markets. And the issue there was you'd be in a team that was not really reflective of a learning team at Wharton. Because one of the distinctive things about a learning team at Wharton is that it's, you know, got a mix of people from different parts of the world and different backgrounds. And you don't always get that if you're just sitting in a room with people who are also in your country and maybe, you know, kind of tend towards small roles. So in any event, these are virtual and as I said, it's designed to, as you said, designed to simulate Wharton's learning team culture. And, you know, I will say that candidates seem to have a pretty okay time doing these. Like, I don't, you know, as much as we kind of complain about how it's a really like sort of different process, candidates seem to navigate through it and, you know, it's always about listening to what people say. We have a ton of tips in the, in that episode that I mentioned, so go back and listen. But is there anything else you wanted to say about this, Alex? Because I know it's. It's just kind of a really different exercise. And as you say, it's not exactly like the learning team for many reasons, but because not everyone's going to get into Wharton in this group, so.
• 11:38
  Speaker B: Right.
• 11:39
  Speaker A: But anyway, yeah. Is there anything else though on this one? No.
• 11:41
  Speaker B: I mean, obviously if they can refer back to the previous episode, I will note that for each year that since Wharton has conducted team based discussions, the prompt has been the same for round one and round two.
• 11:58
  Speaker A: Correct.
• 11:59
  Speaker B: So we're making that assumption.
• 12:01
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 12:01
  Speaker B: That they continue to use the same prompt that they used in round one with those learning initiatives. They might change that. We don't know. Yeah, so. So just be a little bit conscious of that. And then finally we have the MBA interview archive. Yes, I was reading through that this morning just to get some feedback from those that did the TBD in round one. So again, that's another resource. I encourage folks to use the interview archive to look at reports, whatever school you're targeting from the previous round as well as then hopefully after you've conducted the interview to create your own report so other folks can benefit in future round. So. Yeah, that, yeah, but that I think the episode that we did in, in October was really quite, quite well developed. So I would steer people to there rather than rehash some of the things that we, we discussed.
• 13:09
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I would say just one like small tip to people. If you are getting ready, you know, make sure your technology works. Like, you know, make sure your camera's on, you're smiling, you set a collegial tone. I mean this is about getting along with other people and listening and being a collaborator in terms of working with others. So anyway, go back and listen. As I said, it's episode 454, you can go back and listen. But let's shift gears and talk a little bit now about the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking for 2026. This came out last week and we did an article about it on our site. I recorded a couple of videos that we threw up on YouTube. I've, you know, we did some posts. I mean there's been a lot of discussion and we're not the only ones. I mean it's interesting to see, you know, John Byrne from P and Q and all the kind of talking heads in our industry kind of weighing in and of course the schools who did well sharing the FT logo and their rank on their LinkedIn post. And so that's been a big, all week long really, it's been all kind of FT rankings. But Alex, I wanted to just sit down with you and go through this and do so ideally in kind of an orderly fashion. I know you get, I know you're not a big fan of this ranking, but let me just give you, what we'll do is we'll start with giving our listeners the ranking itself and I'll just do the top 20 here overall and then we'll get into some of the movers and shakers in this year's ranking and, and a real kind of unpacking of the methodology and some areas that I think both, both of us will agree are, are pretty flawed. So in any event, the top 20 overall, MIT came out on top. They surged up to number one from the sixth position last year. Inseads in second. Wharton moves to third. They had won the ranking last year, so they dropped to third. Esas in fourth. London Business School follows, then HEC, Paris Esade, CEIBS in China, Berkeley Haas, Harvard Business School at number 10 Northwestern, Kellogg, Nanyang Business School in Singapore. Followed by the Indian School of Business, Peking University, Cornell Johnson, duke Fuqua, Yale, SOM, Cambridge, UVA, Darden. And rounding out the top 20 is the University of Chicago, Booth. So those are. That's kind of the overall ranking. Any thoughts on that, Alex?
• 15:30
  Speaker B: Yeah, I'm just perplexed because it just seems almost random in terms of where these schools are ranked. I mean, I know it's not random. You're going to get into methodology.
• 15:42
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 15:43
  Speaker B: And so forth. And congratulations to Sloan for topping the rankings. And Sloan is absolutely an outstanding program, as we all know, as solid M7 program. But, you know, Sloan number one and Harvard number 10. Just, you know, two outstanding programs in Boston. That just doesn't really ring true to me in terms of how candidates make decisions and so forth. And, you know, as you'll probably talk about, it just seems like the ranking is quite biased toward programs in Europe versus programs in the United States for whatever, you know, for whatever reasons you'll get into.
• 16:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:26
  Speaker B: But, yeah, I mean, you know, it's not that I. I particularly dislike the Financial Times rankings. I just think all the rankings right now are off.
• 16:36
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's strangely. Yeah. So, I mean. Yeah, we'll get into that because I agree with you. I think, you know, in terms of, like, just looking at the hundred schools that they did rank and where some of the movement was, I did want to point out some things that were pretty interesting. So Cranfield School of management in the UK went from 82 to 55. They had the biggest leap. They actually jumped up like 27 slots, which is impressive. Cambridge Judge, they must be very happy over there because they went from 35th to 17th and, you know, probably a much more accurate ranking. I mean, they jumped 18 spots. Right. So the ISB in India went from 27th to 12th, and Notre Dame Mendoza in the United states went from 75th to 61st. So a 14 spot gain. So those are some of the big movers in terms of schools that we talk about or, you know, which I wanted to kind of underline. Obviously there's some schools that moved in the opposite direction. And, you know, the worst case there was Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. They were number 15 last year and they fell to 36. So 21 spots. UT Dallas Jindal, which is a school that's been making a lot of waves, fell from 54th to 68th. UCLA Anderson went from 19th. So they were a top 20 school in this ranking last year. Now they're 32nd. Emory Goizuera fell from 45th to 56th, Washington Foster fell from 34th to 45th IMD our friends in Lausanne went from 22nd to 30th, Tuck from 20th to 26th and Georgetown from 43 to 49. So in terms of schools, we cover and talk a lot about some movement down on a number of areas. And again, I think that the fluctuations. When you see schools jumping 27 spots or 20, I mean it just. It. To me it sort of undermines the methodology because they didn't change the methodology really this year. So it is. Yeah. Sort of head scratching. But any thoughts on these movers? Like anyone that you kind of. That jumps out at you, that moved up or down?
• 18:31
  Speaker B: Well, they all jump out because they move to. To. To too much. Right. So. So yeah, I mean Emory, I forget where you said that. Their place right now, but that's ridiculous in my mind. Yeah, they're a solid top 20 U. S based school. And you know, you add in some European powerhouses that would make them solid top 25, 30 around the world. Right. And what did you say they are?
• 19:03
  Speaker A: They felt 56. Yeah, yeah.
• 19:05
  Speaker B: That just doesn't make any sense to me at all.
• 19:08
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 19:08
  Speaker B: And. And some of the others absolutely doesn't make sense.
• 19:13
  Speaker A: Yeah. Now I want to talk about something else too, which is the exclusions. Right. So we know there are, there are three schools that are arguably top schools in the world. You know, certainly that should be in a ranking like this, who are not present. So two of them, Colombia and Bocconi. Bocconi being in Milan, Columbia, New York, they failed to meet the survey threshold. As some of our listeners must know, the FT survey is largely based on these kind of alumni surveys that you have to do as a school. So you get your alumni to answer questions about how much they're earning, how satisfied they were with career services. There are a lot of different elements that they have to complete and you have to get a certain percentage of graduates from your program. And you're only serving people who graduated three years ago. Right. So you've got to get a percentage of the class that graduated three years ago. And so both Bocconi and Columbia failed to meet the survey threshold. Columbia was number two last year in this ranking and Bocconi was number five. So you have two of the top five schools just falling off the ranking and another school that's not in this ranking, which I'm sure everyone's probably figured out by now, is Stanford. Now Stanford had been in the ranking a few years ago, then last year failed to meet the threshold just the way Columbia and Bocconi did. And this year they just decided they're not playing, so they're not in it out of, you know, just not participating. But what do you think of that? I mean, what. It is strange to me to have schools that are just not present.
• 20:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, obviously, Stanford's a top two program in the world no matter which way you cut it. Right. So for. For some folks, it's the number one. For other folks, it's number two or something like that. So, you know, if you're announcing a ranking and saying these are the top 100 MBA programs in the world and you're not including Stanford, Columbia and Bocconi, that's not true. It's not correct. These three programs sit in the top 100, and one would argue they sit right at the very top of the top 100. So, yeah, I mean, they've. They've got to have a methodology that's inclusive of all the programs that are elite.
• 21:23
  Speaker A: And, you know, I thought maybe they'd close their doors, these three schools or something, because they weren't in the rankings. So I thought maybe they're just not open this year. But it is. It is weird in the sense that I think this highlights another potential weakness in this ranking, which is there's a huge reliance on survey participation from alumni who graduated three years ago of all these programs. And I do wonder, you know, are people who, like, are. Is there any bias in that, like, just inherently in terms of, like, who's going to respond, who's not? You know, if you're a Stanford grad working, you know, sweating it out on a startup that you founded a couple years after graduating, and you are really deep in the weeds, and are you going to respond to a survey? Or maybe you're not even making much money, so would you look good anyway? You know, there's a lot of kind of factors that we can unpack here. But the last thing I wanted to do before we talk about the methodology is just. And I always do this every year, it's, look at this ranking by region. Because I actually think that it is dangerous and not even useful to rank these schools globally. I would much prefer a kind of, here's the US Schools, here's Europe, here's Asia. We could have kind of Latin America. It could be different regions. And so what I did is I just broke out the US And Europe because they're the biggest markets for MBA programs. And I kind of look at the ranking in that lens, and then you start to see I think something that makes a little more sense. Although again, you might quibble with the order, but if you look at the US and we just take sort of the top 15 or 14 schools, I think I picked, I've got MIT, Wharton, Berkeley, Harvard, Kellogg, Cornell, Duke, Yale, Virginia, Chicago, NYU, Dartmouth, UCLA and Michigan. And the reason I stopped there is because those are the first 14 schools. And if we know that Columbia and Stanford are missing and we throw them into the mix, that's 16 schools. And what are those 16 schools?
• 23:12
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, they are the top 16 in the US or at least that's how we look at it in terms of the tiers.
• 23:18
  Speaker A: Right.
• 23:18
  Speaker B: That we profess. And we'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. But again, Graham, it just seems quite a random order of those top 16.
• 23:26
  Speaker A: Yeah, it is.
• 23:27
  Speaker B: So, yeah, they got the right schools, but the order has some serious questions, I think.
• 23:36
  Speaker A: Yeah, agreed. And I did the same thing for Europe. So with Europe, you get INSEAD ESE down in, in Barcelona, London, Business School, HEC, Paris, Esade, also in Barcelona, Cambridge, Judge, IE in Madrid, ESCP in, in France, ESSEC in France, and then Oxford rounding out that top 10 in Europe. And again, I would agree with you that, oh, those are probably the right schools. You might not agree with the order that they're in, but those are some of the best schools in Europe. And so I think it's really fascinating when you look at this ranking, when it's all kind of jumbled together, it's kind of quite a mess. But when you start to separate by region, there's a little more clarity that emerges. Even though, again, I agree with you that it's. They're not in the right order, but the right schools are kind of there and, and directionally. And we'll talk about this. I think sometimes that's what's most important is like, you know, this whole idea of an ordinal ranking where, oh, you know, Berkeley's number three and Yale's number, whatever, 10 or, you know, whatever. I mean, it just. That stuff is probably less important.
• 24:34
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 24:35
  Speaker A: In any event, looking at the methodology, and this is. I had so much fun digging into this. So as some of our listeners know, if they bothered to look at all the details, there are 21 kind of criteria that go into the FTS ranking. Eight of those criteria are from alumni surveys. The survey I was talking about where, you know, they're. They're going to survey the people who graduated three years ago and ask them lots of questions about how Much they're earning what they used to earn before, business school, et cetera. And so those eight criteria actually comprise more than half of the rankings weight. Then there are 12 criteria that come from school data. So like, you know, the school tells you like, oh, you know, what percentage of the faculty have PhDs or there are these different kind of metrics that they're gathering there. And then there's one other area. The final criteria is like a research ranking which is worth about 10% of the ranking overall. And that is like sort of, they grade the schools on how good they are at research. And they do that by looking at the level of publication in the key academic journals and things like that. And I didn't say it, but those school data criteria that I just mentioned, to those 12 data points they get from the schools directly, that's worth about a third of the ranking. So you have about, you know, more than half for the alumni survey, a third for school data. And the last 10% is really just devoted to this kind of research ranking. So you know, and I dug into it further. You know, the alumni survey, it's pretty interesting. They actually base the alumni survey stuff on not just the survey that was run this year for the ranking, but they also include the last two years data as well. And they, they lower weight them. So they give like half of the rating to the coast. The most recent surveys that were done. But then they also include the prior two years at a level of like 25% each. So that's I think to help smooth things a bit. And within all this alumni stuff, it's, it's based on average income. It's based on average salary increase from pre MBA to three years out, as I said. And you know, they, it's funny though, here's something I wanted to just run by you with this data on salary. They say current salaries are converted to US dollars using the IMF international purchasing power parity rates. And so what they do there. And then they also have this thing where they say finally, salaries are weighted to reflect differences between different sectors. I'm a little fuzzy on exactly what that means, but in any event, so that's, I don't know what you make of that, but they're actually taking the salaries and using purchasing power parity so that the salary from someone who's working in India is going to be upweighted because they have, you know, that salary buys you more things in India than it would in New York or something.
• 27:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, okay, I'm starting to understand you
• 27:22
  Speaker A: can continue yeah, there's also, there's also a measure of like what they say value for money. So they're taking into account how much the school costs. They also looked at like career progress. What are the changes in your level of seniority by like title. They also have a question in the survey about like, have you achieved your aims? Like, so when you, why did you go to business school and have you actually done what you hope to do? They ask you to rank your alumni network and to rank your career services office as well or to rate your. So that's all the kind of survey type stuff that's worth more than half of this ranking.
• 27:54
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 27:55
  Speaker A: And I, I mean my view on this PPP purchasing power parity adjustment is that it makes the FT ranking less about who earns the most and more about who's doing best relative to their local economy.
• 28:06
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 28:06
  Speaker A: Which is, I mean that's kind of an interesting metric, but I don't think it's the same thing as global earning power or long term wealth creation. Right. And so I just think people need to know that. So they're not asking like how much you earn, they're asking how far does your salary go where you live? And those are two really different questions. And so I, you know, I just want to really underline this because I feel like if you're an MBA grad and you're thinking, I want maximum wealth accumulation, I may want to work in like multiple markets, I want to be able to live anywhere. I want optionality, you know, then purchasing power parity maybe isn't the best measurement here because in that worldview, absolute income matters. Right? It matters a lot.
• 28:47
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 28:47
  Speaker A: So any event. So turning to the other pieces though of this, there's all these components that are coming directly from the schools. Right. So the schools fill out a kind of survey as well in which they report in percentage of female faculty, percentage of female students, the percentage of women on the board. So these kind of diversity factors that they're measuring, that's worth 10% of the ranking. Another 15% of the ranking is devoted to international faculty percentage, how many international students you have, what's the mobility like? Like are your students leaving the school and going to different markets? So what's the international mobility like? Are there international people on your school's board and is there international coursework experience? And they define that as studying abroad, like going away from the school for at least a month. So it has to be a month or more for it to count. And all these factors about international stuff are worth about 15% of the ranking. And then you get, I can lump these two together. But I said earlier, there's a research rank, there's also a percentage of faculty with doctorates. So I put those two together and that's 15% of the ranking. And the last bit is devoted to carbon footprint of the institution and how much ESG net zero teaching is done. And that's 7% in total. So all this to say there are a bunch of components I'm sure everyone's lost by now. But I just, you know, it's interesting to see how these things weighed and I can't help but argue that some of these factors seem to really penalize the U.S. schools. The U.S. schools cost more. U.S. grads tend to stay in the U.S. even if they've come from abroad. They've kind of gone to the US because they want to work in the US in many instances. So they're punished on these metrics. Right. And then the purchasing power parity, they're punished as well. So there are all these kind of factors that I think are hurting the US schools and simultaneously helping those one year duration highly international schools in Europe. So I just want to put that out there.
• 30:46
  Speaker B: And schools in small countries.
• 30:48
  Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
• 30:49
  Speaker B: European countries are small relative to the US and you're exactly right that that international mobility metric or whatever it is, I think is wrong because when you choose the business school to attend, you're not necessarily choosing it because that business school can send me anywhere. You're choosing it because for many people that's the region in which you want to work post mba. Yeah, right. That's certainly true for many international candidates applying to top US based business schools. Yeah, so. So yeah, that metric is really flawed, I think.
• 31:32
  Speaker A: Now let's imagine I live in London and I come down to France to go to school at hec and then I go and work in London afterwards. I get points for that because I've, you know, changed country. Whereas if I live in New York City and I go to Stanford and then I work in San Francisco, that's way further geographically. Right. But it's the same country, so it doesn't count. So yeah, there are a lot of issues there. Yeah, it just, I mean, it's kind of, I mean, it's fascinating. And I also think some of these things, you know, we've done surveys ourselves where we asked candidates what matters to you when you're choosing a business school? And you know, at the end of the day, you know, the factors that matter are not all being measured here or they're not weighted accordingly. So, you know, so. So it just, it's a bit of a mess. And that's. I just want people to understand that's why the ranking is turning out this way, because they're favoring things that, you know, are. Are, you know, maybe relevant to some candidates. That's certainly possible, but they're. They're certainly favoring things that are working well with these sort of international, smaller programs. And.
• 32:28
  Speaker B: Yeah. And I, I do think these rankings methodologies need to take into account admission statistics.
• 32:38
  Speaker A: Yeah. I cannot believe.
• 32:39
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's just crazy that that's what's ruined the US News ranking by moving away from that. And that's what makes this ranking completely senseless.
• 32:48
  Speaker A: Right. Because the only. Yeah. The only thing in this ranking that relates to admissions statistics would be percentage of female students and percentage of international students. Right. So there's nothing about, like, what were the grades of these people coming in or how do they do on tests or, you know, I mean, and in some levels, like, what kind of jobs did they have and what salaries were they making is not really included. Or if anything, it's included in a sort of perverse way in that if they had great jobs coming in because they're really accomplished individuals, well, they maybe not have as big of a bump post MBA because, you know, and so that'll penalize the school because, remember, they're measuring how well were, you know, how much of a leap did you take. So, yeah, there's all kinds of issues here. And this leads me to the conclusion that there is a way to sort of better rank MBA programs. And I wanted to ask you about this, Alex, because I know, you know, clear admit, and you really have helped brainstorm a very different way of thinking about this. And I just wanted you to talk about that because we think that this ordinal 1 through 100 type ranking is just not smart.
• 33:48
  Speaker B: No, no, it doesn't make any sense. And so, yeah, several years ago now, we developed what we would call a tiered ranking system. And unfortunately, you know, schools don't really jump from tiers on a regular basis, so it's not really that newsworthy once you've set up the ranking and so forth, which may be a perverse reason why these media want to change their rankings on a regular basis. But the point is we've got decision wire data, so this is market data, and candidates making choices based on their offers, based on where they applied, where they got admitted, what scholarship dollars they were offered. And so on and so forth. So we've got a lot of data, data to support our assertions. Yes, and you know, we would. And so before I do a bit of a deeper dive into this, you know, candidates should use rankings as at the very top of the funnel to sort of start thinking about the schools that they should be targeting and applying to. But then once they've done that sort of very initial assessment, stop looking at rankings and, and just do deep dives on the schools you're starting to identify. So our ranking would be something like Harvard and Stanford in that tier one group, closely followed by Wharton. And we've got a lot of evidence that suggests that folks will, the majority of folks will select Harvard over Wharton or Stanford over Wharton, et cetera, et cetera. And obviously, you know, our heritage is Wharton. You're a Wharton grad. You actually got admitted to Harvard and chose Wharton. So you're, you're a bit of an outlier, Graham, but you're a Wharton grad. I worked at Wharton for lots of years. So we would have, you know, the incentive to stick Wharton right into that top two and make it a top three. But they're just slightly behind. So they're in their own little tier behind Harvard and Stanford. But then the rest of the M7 form the next tier. Right. So you've got Kellogg and Columbia and Sloan and Chicago and Booth now. So what's the point of tiers? Tiers basically, such that depending on your professional goals and your geographic goals, your personal goals, etc. Etc. You might decide that Booth is actually a better program for you than Columbia, or you might decide that Sloane is a better program for you than Kellogg, etc. Etc. But because they're within the same tiers, that can make absolute sense if they're in different tiers. There's sort of an absolute here. We would say, well, actually Harvard in most cases is always going to be a better program than a program in a tier below or whatever it might be. So that's the role of the tiers. So we have those four programs in that tier and then behind that we have a tier of three generally. And that would be TOC and Hass and Yale. And then the tiers go on. And obviously I'm only mentioning the US based schools in this tiering because as you point out, Graeme, it's very difficult to compare apples to oranges when you, when, when they're geographically very different. Right. So, you know, candidates generally have real aspirations to either want to study their MBA in the United States or Study their MBA in Europe or study their MBA in Asia, depending on their ultimate goals and so on and so forth.
• 37:44
  Speaker A: And you could have a tier within. You know, we can do the tiers in Europe. Right. You would say that LBS and INSEAD are.
• 37:49
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, so. No, absolutely. So, so I, I would stick LBS and, and INSEAD in that top tier, closely followed then by ESA and so on and so forth. So there'd be a European tier, there'd be an Asian. Your tier structure, there's a tier structure for the United States and so forth. But our point is these ordinal rankings, as you point out, makes no sense. Just because a program's ranked number four does not mean to say it's a better program for every candidate than a program ranked number five. That's what we're trying to convince people to move away from.
• 38:30
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 38:31
  Speaker B: And this idea that, you know, oh, Goizada just suddenly plunged 20 in the financial Times ranking, you know, everything's gone wrong. Absolutely not. Who knows why that would happen. But Goizada is a very strong program. Was. Before Financial Times ranking came out. Remains. So since it's come out.
• 38:52
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 38:53
  Speaker B: And, and yeah, it's, it's a little bit slow. Sensationalist. I think.
• 38:57
  Speaker A: Yeah. I don't think we've seen people flocking, you know, to, you know, to join, you know, Siebes over hbs. Right. And Siebes is ahead of Harvard in this overall FT ranking. Right.
• 39:08
  Speaker B: So now, now that said, if the candidate knows that they want their career to be in China post mba.
• 39:17
  Speaker A: Right.
• 39:17
  Speaker B: For that candidate, it does make Sieves a better choice.
• 39:20
  Speaker A: Yes. And that's why we need to separate.
• 39:23
  Speaker B: Yeah. Geographically it makes sense to separate these programs, as we've discussed. So anyway, I really encourage folks to think about the rankings more in a tiered structure. It makes. I mean, I've been in this industry for 30 years, Graham, so nobody's going to convince me otherwise at this point.
• 39:45
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, I agree. I appreciate you unpacking that. And I think that we're really fortunate in that we're on the front lines. We get to see how people vote with their feet. And you need only look, look at the class profiles. You know, you pointed out how the FT is like sorely lacking in taking into account who's being admitted into these programs. So we publish all those on our site. The schools publish them. Look at the class profiles, look at the career reports, look at the decision wire data and you will clearly see a picture. And I, and I. Yeah, so. And even if you are applying in multiple markets like Europe and the U.S. i think it's fine to just think of their. You know, you can think of sort of separate tiers, and a lot of it really should depend on where you want to be after. That's the geography rules. So, in any event, Alex, thanks for doing this. We managed to somehow ramble on about the Wharton CBD and the FT rankings for a really long episode, but we'll do another episode for next week, back to our normal kind of format where we'll profile candidates and discuss decision wire entries or whatever's out there to discuss. But I'm looking forward to it. Alex, thanks so much for doing this.
• 40:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, very good. Stay safe, everyone. Take care.
• 40:53
  Speaker A: It.