Insead tops ‘Financial Times’ MBA rankings

Insead, the business school with campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi, has topped the Financial Times' Global MBA rankings for the first time since they were introduced in 1999.

This is the first time that an MBA programme with a substantial Asian presence has been ranked number one by the Financial Times , and marks a growing interest from elite students in Asian business and business schools.

Insead is still the only top-ranked business school to teach its full-time MBA on multiple campuses, with 75 per cent of the 1,000 students studying in Singapore or in Fontainebleau, just outside Paris.

It is also the first time a one-year MBA programme has been ranked in the top slot. The flagship MBA programmes of the four previous winners – Harvard Business School, Stanford GSB and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, and London Business School in the UK – are all two-year degrees.

These schools have been ranked in the top five slots along with Insead for the past three years by the FT.

The full-time MBA programme at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School has been ranked 79th in the world and 24th in Europe in the survey. The school had been ranked 73rd in the 2015 rankings.

The Insead MBA was the world’s first one-year programme when it began in 1959, though many others have followed. As the cost of studying for an MBA has steadily risen, many students are wary of taking on the debt associated with two-year degrees - students are frequently more than $100,000 in debt when they graduate. Though fees and living costs can be substantial, it is often the opportunity cost of lost salary that is the biggest factor.

Insead’s rise to the top of the business school world has been steady. Today, more Insead graduates are chief executives of FT 500 companies than those from any other business school in the FT rankings, other than Harvard. Insead alumni include André Calantzopoulos of Philip Morris, António Horta-Osório of Lloyds Banking Group and Ben Keswick of Jardine Matheson.

In October 2015, the part-time executive MBA programme run jointly by Insead and China's elite Tsinghua University topped the FT's EMBA ranking, also for the first time.

In total, 157 business schools from 19 countries competed in the annual FT Global MBA rankings 2016, the 18th release of the figures.

While US business schools still dominate the ranking with 47 schools listed, it is the first time that they account for less than half of all ranked schools. Thirty ranked schools are from Europe - half in the UK - and 13 from Asia. When the FT’s MBA rankings were introduced in 1999, no Asian business schools were included.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016