Students from Kellogg’s popular EMBA elective Strategic Brand Management + International Finance pose in the 19th Century Portuguese palace where students completed a live case exercise. Photo credit: Maria Rebelo
THREE DIFFERENT RANKINGS, THREE DIFFERENT METHODOLOGIES
Each of the rankings we include in our composite are based on vastly different methodologies, making oranges to oranges comparisons more difficult across them.
Like U.S. News’ full-time MBA specialization rankings, the executive MBA list is based solely on ratings by business school deans and directors of AACSB-accredited MBA programs.
Respondents are asked to nominate up to 15 programs for excellence from the list of business schools surveyed. Schools receiving the most votes are numerically ranked based on the number of nominations they received, as long as the program received seven or more nominations.
The Financial Times surveys both schools and alumni for its ranking, collecting data on 15 different metrics. Its highest-weighted metrics are related to compensation – average salary three years after course completion accounts for 15% of the ranking while amount of salary increase accounts for 16%. (Wharton EMBA’s reported an average salary of $319,716.) Other metrics include work experience, female faculty, international students and more. It also looks at ESG, net zero teaching, and carbon footprint metrics.
For 2024, 4,409 alumni completed the FT ranking survey providing data on salary increases after the program, career progress, and aims achieved. FT also considers research published by the school’s full-time faculty.
Fortune uses data collected via school surveys, figures available on school websites, and information collected from companies and executives. For its program score (weighted 55%), Fortune considered factors like average years of work experience, average years of management experience, and percentage of students with an advanced degree. This is collected via a school survey.
A quarter of the ranking is based on the Fortune 1000 Score – the number of a school’s C-level executives from any school MBA program at Fortune 1000 companies, the magazine’s annual list of the 1000 largest companies in the U.S. Another 15% is based on the average number of Google searches for a business school per month, converted to an annual metric. The final 5% comes from the school’s previous Fortune ranking.
Besides our updated composite list, our ranking table shows prospective students how schools fared in each of the three rankings for easy comparison. (Click through to pages 3 and 4 for the full list).
Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business EMBA students pose during their international immersion in Santiago, Chile, last year. Mendoza transformed its EMBA offerings in South Bend and Chicago into a single Global EMBA cohort beginning this fall. Courtesy photo
CHOOSING THE RIGHT EMBA
The biggest, most prestigious business schools can and do attract many international executives to their EMBA programs as well as domestic execs who live at least a plane ride away. But, many EMBA prospects look for well regarded programs near their home turfs – perhaps a car ride away for the weekend classes. They tend to be older and more experienced than students in full-time programs, and the majority are looking to accelerate their careers in their current industry or organization, not necessarily to pivot. Some just want to improve their own leadership and management skills to better function in their current positions.
For these would-be applicants, Executive MBA rankings should be considered a useful guide, not a deciding factor. Since many EMBA choices are made by geography, rankings place a smaller role than they might for those researching full-time or online MBAs. If a prospective student lives in Atlanta, for example, they’d surely consider Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business, which ranks No. 12 in our composite.
EMBA prospects wanting to stick close to New York City have no shortage of options. Considering just the ranked programs from P&Q’s composite, there’s three NYC programs in the top 10: New York University’s Stern School of Business (No. 4), University of Fordham Gabelli School of Business (No. 10), and Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business (No. 9). There’s also Columbia Business School which previously ranked at the very top of our ranking before Economist dropped out of the EMBA ranking game. Columbia has not participated in Financial Times ranking for its stand alone U.S. program for the last couple years, and so has fallen to No. 14 in our composite. It should be noted that U.S. News ranked it the fourth best program in the U.S. for 2024 which Fortune ranked it the second best.
Cornell (Johnson) offers its Metro New York EMBA at its Cornell Tech Campus in NYC. Cornell rose 9 spots in this year’s composite, from No. 18 to No. 9. The school has four EMBA programs in its portfolio, each designed for a particular executive student. Enrolling about 430 new EMBA students per year, it is one of the the largest executive MBA programs in the U.S.
For most schools, it is more important for a program to be ranked among the best, rather than what the program’s actual rank might be. The networking value of a regional program can provide as much bang for the buck as a school with a national or global reputation. In other words, think of a ranking as something of a seal of approval, third-party validation of a program’s quality and strength.
Poets&Quants For Execs’ full composite ranking of the best U.S. EMBA programs is presented on the next two pages.
NEXT PAGE: P&Q’s Top Executive MBA programs in the U.S., No. 1-33
