UCI’s Graduate School of Management climbed up six notches to No. 22 on the Financial Times of London’s ranking of 106 business schools worldwide. Among U.S. schools, UCI ranked No. 18.
The Financial Times said UCI ranked No. 1 in the area of information technology. The school also ranked high for research (No. 6) and alumni believing that their objectives were met during their school experience (No. 6).
But UCI didn’t even appear on list of the top 50 MBA programs in the United States in the Feb. 7 issue of Forbes. The magazine compared the costs of getting an MBA at the schools with the salary gains it generated. Harvard’s B-school topped that list.
“The Forbes article was based on a survey of 1994 alumni, when GSM was a very different school,” said David Blake, dean of the Graduate School of Management.
In the Financial Times study, schools were ranked according to data provided through questionnaires sent to the schools and to graduates of the class of 1996, as well as by an independent study of faculty research. The Financial Times examined value and quality of the schools’ MBA programs, their diversity, and their research.
On top of the Financial Times list were Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Stanford. The scores of the No. 9 to No. 25 schools were closely clustered. The Financial Times said a slight change could alter the rankings in this group. Besides UCI, the other U.S. schools in the cluster included Cornell, UC Berkeley, NYU, UCLA, Dartmouth, Michigan, Duke, Yale, Virginia, Carnegie-Mellon and North Carolina.
Blake said rankings based on salaries, such as Forbes’, are less relevant than before because more students are starting their own firms or are taking stock options that might not be worth much presently, but could be in the future. For example, students from the two most recent GSM graduating classes had formed at least 14 new companies, he said.
“There are a number of high-tech millionaires, as well as billionaires, whose annual salaries would be quite low relative to their colleagues in more traditional industries,” he said. “Annual income is no longer a catch-all measure in these days of compensation through equities. The competition for outstanding MBAs in the high-tech industry has led to very different compensation practices.”
The UC Irvine Graduate School of Management also has ranked high in other publications: No. 5 among “techno-MBA” programs by Computerworld, No. 34 by U.S. News & World Report, and in Business Week’s top 50. n
