St. Gallen Recaptures First In The 2024 Financial Times Ranking Of Master’s In Management

Well, it didn’t last all that long. HEC Paris nudged aside the University of St. Gallen to win first place in last year’s Financial Times ranking of the best Master’s in Management programs. That was a major feat after St. Gallen had been at the top of the ranking for a dozen straight years.

St. Gallen, however, came right back into first place in the new 2024 MiM ranking, while HEC slipped into second. The flip-flop is much less consequential than the strong showing by INSEAD in its first year of eligibility in the ranking. INSEAD’s MiM program, launched in the fall of 2020, placed third ahead of fourth-place Edhec Business School and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Those two latter schools moved up seven ranking positions from last year when they, respectively, placed 11th and 12th.

While the FT bills this as a global ranking, it would be far more appropriate to call it a European/Asian ranking. U.S. schools tend to turn up their noses on this list, declining to cooperate. If they did, the ranking would look significantly different than it does given the stature of U.S. schools now in the MiM market. Only two U.S. schools chose to participate: Hult International Business School and the University of South Carolina. Hult’s MiM took 44th place, down five spots from last year, while USC ranked 79th, down 17 places.

MORE U.S. SCHOOLS ARE LAUNCHING MIM PROGRAMS

Yet, a slew of prestige U.S. schools have jumped into the MiM market, including Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. More than 30 other schools boast MIM programs, including Northwestern Kellogg, MIT Sloan, Michigan Ross, and Duke Fuqua.

In any case, the predominant graduate degree in business in Europe is not the MBA but the MiM which is why this ranking conveys major bragging rights among those schools. Some 77 of the 100 ranked programs on the FT list are based in Europe. India has also come on strong, with 14 MiM programs now ranked by the Financial Times, up from 11 last year.

As is typical, there were some fairly significant swings in year-over-year rankings. Among the Top 25 programs, University College Dublin fell the most, dropping 11 places to rank 28th from 17th last year, while ESADE Business School in Spain declined ten places to remain in the Top 25 but at a rank of 18th vs. 8th in 2023.

EIGHT OF THE TOP 25 SCHOOLS HAD PERFECT EMPLOYMENT RECORDS

Besides St. Gallen, the clear winners on this list include the Nova School of Business and Economics, up seven places to rank eighth from 15th last year. A pair of schools in the Top 25 advanced nine places, Tongji University School of Economics and Management in China, finishing 13th, and Leseg School of Management in France, ranking 23rd, up from 32nd in 2023.

Regardless of where a school falls in the FT pecking order, the real winner of the ranking is most likely the degree program itself. The employment rates out of these programs have been consistently high at almost all of the business schools, approaching if not equal to 100% within three months of graduation. In fact, eight of the top 25 schools were able to get every single one of their graduates jobs this past year. Another five reported placement rates of 98% or 99%. A glaring, if not embarrassing exception, was the ICN Business School in France which placed only 36% of its graduates three months after commencement.

Also, among the Top 25 programs, six-figure salaries three years within graduation were the norm, with the grads at Germany’s HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management reporting the highest average of $140,418, just behind St. Gallen at $140,020, though three Indian schools, with their salaries inflated due to the FT purchasing parity adjustment, had reported salaries even higher: $156,010 at IIM-Ahmedabad, $152,765 at IIM-Bangalore, and $144,385 at IIM Calcutta. The lowest salaries were reported by graduates of Durham University Business School: a mere $47,606.

The Financial Times 2024 Top 25 Master in Management Ranking