Wall Street Journal Releases Ranking Of World's Best Business Schools

Stanford tops the new MBA ranking by WSJ and Times Higher Education. But with big-name schools pulling out, there are question marks over its credibility

The Wall Street Journal has just released its long-awaited MBA ranking that faced criticism for its complicated methodology and the fact that many of the world’s top business schools pulled out.

The ranking, a joint effort with Times Higher Education of the UK, does not include many of the most well-known schools, including Wharton, Harvard, Columbia and London Business School, which are all ranked in the top-10 of the Financial Times’ ranking, because they declined to participate.

The best schools with two-year MBAs, according to the WSJ/THE list are Stanford, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Chicago Booth, Duke Fuqua, Virginia Darden, Yale SOM, Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, CEIBS, and Michigan Ross, in that order.

The ranking placed prestigious schools far below their place in the other main rankings, raising questions about its reliability as a benchmark of quality for MBA applicants. UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, long a top-10 school in league tables produced by the FT, Bloomberg et al, was ranked 16th, behind the University of Pittsburg, which placed 82nd in the FT’s 2018 list.

The WSJ/THE ranking is likely to be among the most...