Should You Trust the Businessweek MBA Rankings?

Keep in mind that, while MBA rankings can be useful in your initial MBA research, you have to approach them with skepticism and caution. MBA rankings can give you a start on generating a list of target schools, but you should certainly not rely on them to make any final conclusions or decisions.

(For this reason, our directory of top MBA programs doesn’t focus on a ranking formula, but on the curriculum, class profile, employment report and culture of each MBA program.)

The Bloomberg Businessweek Best Business School Rankings 2025–26 ranks schools from different regions, but in separate lists (US, Europe & Middle East, Canada, Asia-Pacific) rather than a combined global ranking.

This page analyzes the 2025–2026 list of US schools, identifying concerns with its methodology and approach.

How Businessweek Creates Its MBA Rankings

Businessweek’s methodology is fairly unique among MBA rankings in that it’s highly qualitative and focused on what the relevant stakeholders—students, alumni, and recruiters—consider important.

As such, the weighting of the five categories that make up the ranking is itself based on respondents’ rankings of the most important factors for them. This means the categories have different weightings each year. This year, the weightings are as follows:

• Compensation (37.7%)
• Learning (25.9%)
• Networking (18.8%)
• Entrepreneurship (11.6%)
• Inclusion (6%)

The Learning, Networking, and Entrepreneurship categories are wholly based on survey responses.

The Compensation category consists of a mix of survey responses and school data on four points: median salary after graduation, percentage of class with a job, percentage of class with a bonus, and size of bonus.

The Inclusion category consists only of school data on race and gender.

Overall, around 35% of the ranking is based on hard data, the remaining 65% on survey responses where respondents stated how much they agreed with various statements about their experience.

No specific examples are given, but a hypothetical statement could be “The career services office was helpful during my job search,” which respondents would then rank on a seven-point scale from “completely disagree” to “completely agree.”

General Observations

Unlike other major rankings, the Businessweek MBA rankings are created using mostly qualitative data. Businessweek is not very open about how the list is constructed beyond this general point.

Granted, the weights of the five categories are publicly available, along with descriptions of the calculations involved in the ranking. But only vague information is given regarding what questions are asked in the survey itself (e.g., “we explore the quality, depth and range of instruction”). It’s also not very clear whether and how questions differ for different categories of respondents (students, alumni, and recruiters).

This means it is hard to definitively say why certain schools rank higher than other schools in each of the categories or to assess the relevance of the questions included.

The qualitative focus and lack of transparency in scoring makes for a shady ranking. Who is to say that Businessweek doesn’t play with the results to create more tantalizing headlines?

The last observation that can be made concerns the student survey. In theory, asking the students to score their school makes sense; after all, who is better equipped to review a school than its students? But when students are asked to rank their school, they have nothing to compare it against. After all, they’re not attending multiple programs at once!

And not only that, but their feedback is also relative to their expectations. A student at a particularly prestigious school, for example, expects an amazing experience. If their experience turns out to be “great” instead of amazing, the student might give their school a lower score than someone who expects a “good” experience but receives a great one.

Businessweek vs. US News

Reading through other current rankings of MBA programs, such as those of U.S. News and the Financial Times (FT), another question arises: How can they vary so widely?

In other articles, you can find full breakdowns of the U.S. News and FT rankings. The following table compares the results of the three rankings at a glance:

Business School	U.S. News	Businessweek	Financial Times
UPenn Wharton	1st	2nd	1st
Northwestern Kellogg	2nd	5th	4th
Stanford GSB	2nd	1st	—**
Chicago Booth	4th	7th	9th
MIT Sloan	5th	11th	3rd
Dartmouth Tuck	6th	6th	11th
Harvard	6th	4th	6th
NYU Stern	6th	12th	15th
Columbia	9th	9th	2nd
Yale SOM	10th	17th	13th
Berkeley Haas	11th	3rd	8th
UVA Darden	11th	10th	11th
Duke Fuqua	13th	13th	5th
Michigan Ross	13th	14th	14th
Cornell Johnson	15th	8th	6th
UT Austin McCombs	16th	21st	17th
Emory Goizueta	17th	16th	20th
Carnegie Mellon Tepper	18th	15th	22nd
UCLA Anderson	18th	19th	10th
Vanderbilt Owen	18th	27th	25th
Georgia Tech Scheller	21st	23rd	29th
Indiana Kelley	22nd	30th	—**
UW Foster	22nd	18th	16th
Georgetown McDonough	24th	22nd	19th
Ohio State Fisher	24th	37th	—**
USC Marshall	24th	20th	23rd
Washington Olin	24th	30th	18th
UNC Kenan–Flagler	28th	28th	24th
Rice Jones	29th	25th	17th
Georgia Terry	29th	23rd	28th
UF Warrington	38th	—	21st

These differences can largely be explained by looking at the methodologies used by the different publications, the specific measures they’re taking into account.

Businessweek’s approach is distinctly the most qualitative of the three; it relies to a large extent on survey responses to inherently subjective questions. In this way it’s quite different from the U.S. News and FT methodologies, and naturally arrives at different results.

The specific areas of focus also differ. Inclusion is a factor for the Businessweek ranking. It’s factored in to an even greater extent in FT’s ranking. Meanwhile, it’s not a category at all in the U.S. News ranking.

U.S. News has its own unique metrics, including the focus on median GMAT/GRE scores and GPAs to gauge how selective the school is. And FT, too, has metrics that don’t show up elsewhere, including a “research rank” and assessment of the school’s record on sustainability.

There are also anomalies such as the exclusion of Stanford from the current FT list, apparently because the publication didn’t receive enough survey responses from its alumni. It’s safe to say FT does not actually think Stanford falls outside the top 100; rather, the omission indicates Stanford doesn’t have sufficient interest in the FT list to put in the effort to compete.

We’re not trying to make any claim about which publication’s methodology is best here. Rather, the variety of approaches taken to creating these kinds of rankings, and the stark differences in their results, should make you think twice about taking any ranking as gospel.

Businessweek MBA Rankings 2025: Key Takeaways

The Businessweek MBA ranking attempts to measure the opinions of key stakeholders—students and recruiters—more accurately than any other listing.

Unfortunately, this approach de-emphasizes quantitative data, and a lack of transparency makes it difficult to fully gauge the reliability of these rankings. Nonetheless, it might be useful for certain applicants to dig deeper into the “Networking” category, a feature unique to Businessweek but important to all MBA candidates.

So How Can You Find the Best MBA Program (Without Rankings)?

Once you determine roughly which schools you are qualified to attend—and the rankings can definitely factor into this initial list—we encourage you to leave the rankings behind and instead focus on the practical questions that will help you figure out which MBA program will provide value to your career. These are simple, practical questions:

• Does the school have relationships with your target employers?
• Is the alumni network interesting for your post-MBA career field and location?
• Is the curriculum, both inside and outside the classroom, going to fill the gaps in your skills and experiences?
• Are the faculty and research centers relevant to your interests?
• Will you fit in culturally at the school?

Answering these questions will help you find the right MBA program to enhance your career.

Navigate through the intricacies of MBA rankings with our expert MBA consultants and gain clarity on your journey towards Stanford GSB and beyond.