Cracking the rankings Part (ii): Understanding the Financial Times European Business Schools rankings

This article follows Part (i), in which the workings of the Financial Times (FT) rankings of programme areas was discussed, with the MBA given as an example. In this Part (ii) the focus is on the FT's European Business Schools ranking, which is built on schools’ performances across most of the individually ranked programmes. No attention has been given to this ranking in the literature hitherto. This reconstruction depends on reconstructions of the underlying programme rankings. However, there are more unavailable data and less detail given about the methodology. Nevertheless, the rankings can be reproduced with a fit nearly as good as that shown in Part (i) for the programme areas. Total activity and average performance across areas are considered, so there is an interesting trade‐off for managers to consider. Access to the quantitative scorings also enables researchers to pursue hypotheses and analyses as attempted in the literature for the MBA.