Global Executive MBA back among the top 50

The renowned Financial Times EMBA ranking is the most significant ranking of MBA programs in the world. Given that virtually all aspiring MBA students turn to it when it comes to making their program choices, achieving particularly good results in this ranking is crucially important for business schools.

Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger, Rector of WU Vienna, too is delighted with the performance of the Global EMBA.

CSR and reweighted criteria

For the first time in years, the Financial Times has made changes to how it ranks business schools: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a new ranking category (accounting for 3% of the overall result). Here, the Financial Times takes a closer look at the proportion of modules in the curriculum dealing with CSR, ethics and social or environmental issues. As for the reweighting of ranking criteria, it is interesting to note that greater emphasis is put on gender-related aspects: “The proportion of female lecturers, the proportion of female students and the proportion of female advisory-board members have become significantly more important.

Together, these three categories now account for 12%, rather than 9%, of the overall result. In other words, diversity is playing a bigger and bigger role in the Financial Times ranking as well, and this is something we very much welcome,” explains Prof. Stöttinger.

The Financial Times EMBA ranking seen through the eyes of program participants

“For us as a business school, this is, of course, a great result because it highlights that all our efforts in recent years have been geared in the right direction. What is much more important, though, is to think about what the result means for our students and alumni,” says Prof. Stöttinger.

Thematically, the ranking can be broken down into three major areas:

• career development,
• diversity of the business school and
• research/CSR (new).

In terms of career development, the Global Executive MBA has significantly improved on last year, not only as far as the increase in compensation (+47%) is concerned but also when it comes to career progression (#67 out of 100) and with regard to the objectives reached (78%).

As for the diversity of the business school, the program's performance has been even more impressive: In five out of seven categories (including the three gender-related ones), it has scored better results this time. Research-wise, WU Vienna has moved up 4 positions compared to 2017, and in the newly introduced CSR category, the Global Executive MBA has taken a respectable 43rd place with its curriculum.