Cracking the rankings Part (i): Understanding the Financial Times MBA rankings

League tables are of great interest to universities. This is particularly true for business schools, for which the Financial Times (FT) produces a suite of rankings of programme areas on a rolling annual cycle. Despite publication by the FT of most of the inputs and outlines of the methodologies, these are often little used by business school managers or researchers. This is the first of a pair of papers that show how the FT's data and methodology can be used to reconstruct the underlying calculations to a very high degree of fit. This can help business school managers understand strengths and weaknesses and thus inform strategic decisions. Researchers can also test hypotheses they advance or search for patterns more robustly. This article concentrates on the FT's programme area rankings, using the MBA rankings as the main example; the second paper turns to their more complex aggregate European Business Schools ranking.