Varying routes to the top: identifying different strategies in the MBA marketplace

The market for MBA degrees is changing rapidly. As this market tends to maturity, an increase in the number of universities offering these degrees is evident, and also in the different formats in which these degrees are offered. In this increasingly crowded marketplace, there exist two main sources of information that buyers (students as well as prospective employers of MBA students) can use to assess the products on offer–whether or not a Business school/MBA programme is accredited, and also the position of the school in available rankings, a number of which are regularly published. Playing ‘the rankings game’ is one that occupies the time and effort of many MBA directors globally, as they all try to edge their way upwards in order to attract more and better students. The problem with an ordinal ranking, though, is that it suggests too readily that it is based upon a unidimensional measure. We use the data behind one of these rankings, that of the Financial Times top 100, full-time MBA programmes in 2008, in order to explore to what extent schools are using different routes to try to improve their rankings. Using a variety of multivariate statistical tools, we base our analysis on the three underlying factors of alumni career progress, diversity, and idea generation. What emerges is a clearer picture of the extent to which programmes that are ranked very closely do, in fact, base their success on very different routes to the top.