David Cohen
MATP
7 February 2007
The Australian
Copyright 2007 News Ltd. All Rights Reserved
The FT's latest list reveals a growing gap between our top two MBA providers, reports David Cohen
THE Australian Graduate School of Management and the Melbourne Business School continued to move in opposite directions in the rankings of the world's full-time MBA providers published by the Financial Times.
The British paper's survey is released each year with considerable fanfare, and each year it prompts complaints from educators, not least in Australia.
Among the common criticisms is the lack of agreement between compilers of the various business school surveys published by the likes of The Economist Intelligence Unit, Business Week and US News & World Report.
Nevertheless, the FT exercise is generally regarded as the sector equivalent of the Billboard top 100.
The latest survey shows the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania once again in top spot, followed by Columbia and Harvard universities.
The remainder of the top 10 changed little from the last time the list was published, except that the business schools of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge leapfrogged each other in much the same way as their Australian counterparts.
AGSM, a school within the business faculty of the University of NSW, surged to 49, a 26-place improvement on its showing the previous year and one of the most improved results of any of the institutions surveyed.
Melbourne, meanwhile, slipped from 69th to 79th place, despite doing well in categories such as the hiring of female educators.
Increasingly, the FT noted this year, a gulf is emerging between the top business schools and the also-rans, between schools in different regions of the world, and between different types of programs.
Regionally, the two Australian institutions vied against the MBA programs offered by Singapore's two established universities.
All four schools, though, were notably down on the showing by China-Europe International Business School, an institution jointly established by the city government of Shanghai and the European Union little more than a decade ago, which this year became the first Asian business school to enter the top dozen.
CEIBS, which moved up 10 spots from last year, saw its graduates' salaries increase by 159per cent three years after graduation, the highest pay rise among all the listed schools audited during the same period. The salary increase percentage for AGSM and MBS was 81 per cent and 83 per cent respectively.
For the latest annual survey, its ninth to date, the FT mostly emphasised salary progression, which accounted for 55 per cent of a school's final placing.
The figures were compared after converting them into US dollars on the basis of purchasing-power parity rates.
Among the other criteria were various measures of internationalisation, including the percentage of foreign-born faculty, international students and global experience.
Professor Evan Douglas, head of the Queensland University of Technology's Graduate School of Business, said QUT's MBA no longer appeared in the FT rankings partly because it had been squeezed out by schools from countries such as Mexico and China. He said the large weight given to salary increases in the rankings made it hard to compete with schools in countries where an MBA could mean a meteoric salary leap for a graduate going from a lowly paid local job to a globally competitive salary at a multinational corporation.
US and European graduates also experienced greater salary increases because of MBAs than their Australian counterparts did, Professor Douglas said.
The QUT business school was also working on increasing publication rates and the number of its academics with PhDs to help boost its performance in the rankings, he said.
The Singapore comparisons with the Australian schools on the international front also rankled with some local educators.
While the likes of AGSM, Melbourne, Queensland and Macquarie recruited international business students and faculty from dozens of countries across the world, the Singaporean schools relied on Chinese Malaysian students drawn from just across the local causeway for their international cohort, a representative of one Australian MBA school pointed out.
