Spain’s IE Business School overtakes Warwick as leading online MBA provider

Spain’s IE Business School beat the UK’s Warwick Business School leading online MBA providerwhich performs strongly in terms of measures including post-graduation salary increases, according to the tenth annual FT evaluation of the business degree.

Warwick and Imperial College maintain strong positions in the list of ten ranked institutions, ahead of two other British schools: Durham and the University of Liverpool.

In the US, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Massachusetts Amherst fared well, with good scores from the University of North Carolina and the University of Florida: Warrington, both longtime participants.

The FT rankings come at a time of growing interest in online learning, which has intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic as many business schools, along with other higher education institutions, have begun to offer students a wider range of hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous options.

See the more detailed table here.

Overall demand for MBAs has softened in North America and Europe, partly in response to a tight labor market as employers seek to retain existing employees with additional incentives rather than lose them to full-time education.

As a result, the traditional division between online and face-to-face courses has changed. Even many leading business schools offer online instruction, typically supplemented with face-to-face meetings to allow for more part-time study and less travel to campus.

Participation in the FT rankings is voluntary and requires cooperation and data from both business schools and alumni within three years of completing their program. Some schools were excluded due to high eligibility standards, and some of the 23 schools entered could not be ranked because too few alumni responded to the questions.

The ranking weighs factors such as salary, pay rise and value for money, taking tuition fees into account.

IE alumni reported the second-highest PPP-adjusted average salary three years after graduation, at nearly $206,000. That was slightly below the average for the Isenberg Online MBA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which was $233,000.

IE graduates also reported the second highest pay rise as a result of the degree and the shortest average completion time of just 1.5 years, compared to 4.5 years for the University of Liverpool Management School.

A former student at IE Business School in Madrid said it “offers a unique mix of subjects in a very beautiful city. . . I particularly liked the focus on accounting and entrepreneurship, which was very helpful in planning future roles and opportunities”.

Online MBA students said that personal development was their primary motivation for studying, ahead of career opportunities, management development and salary increases. In the case of online courses, a lower proportion of people were interested in a salary increase, career, employer or country change than in the case of full-time, face-to-face MBA courses. But a larger proportion of Internet users – 16 percent – wanted to start their own company.

Men continue to outnumber women studying and teaching online MBAs. IE was the closest to gender parity among its faculty, with 49 percent women, while the University of Massachusetts Amherst: Isenberg had the highest proportion of female students at 41 percent.

IE had the highest proportion of non-domestic students, 92 percent, while 97 percent of Imperial reported international instructors. University of Florida: Warrington was ranked first for the diversity of student professional backgrounds at the time of admission, ahead of IE in second place.

Uniquely among the FT rankings, because it is so important to online learning, they take into account the opinions of alumni about the level of interaction between students, the level of teamwork and the availability of instructors. In one such indicator, IE ranked second after Carnegie Mellon: Tepper . University of Massachusetts Amherst: Isenberg was the leader in live teaching sessions, other course materials and online exams, based on alumni reviews.

In line with the FT’s recent Global MBA Rankings 2023, the online MBA rankings are putting a new emphasis on sustainability this year, crediting business schools – or their universities more broadly – ​​with a public carbon report and net target date. zero emissions.

IE’s Global Online MBA ranked first based on these new metrics. It also achieved the best result in its long-standing self-assessment of the extent to which core courses include environmental, social and governance factors – and a new measure for incorporating climate solutions to help reduce carbon emissions.

The University of North Carolina: Kenan-Flagler ranks highest in the number of research articles published by its full-time faculty on the FT50 list of prestigious peer-reviewed academic journals, a measure of academic excellence. The University of Florida: Warrington finished second.

Overall, alumni said that online MBA providers are the most effective in teaching economics, organizational behavior, and general management. Schools were judged to have performed less well in the emerging areas of fintech and e-commerce.