Penn’s Wharton doesn’t make Financial Times’ MBA rankings due to lack of alumni responses

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School was not included in the Financial Times’ global ranking of MBA business schools this year, marking the first time in the annual listing’s 25-year run that Penn’s program did not appear on the list while still participating.

Published on Sunday, the list from the FT puts Columbia Business School in the top spot among the 100 listed schools. Wharton ranked at the top of the list in 2022 — a spot it has held 11 times since the FT began publishing the ranking, according to the publication. In 2021, Wharton, as well as several other typically top schools, did not participate in the ranking, reportedly due to pandemic-related data issues.

Wharton was not included in the ranking this year because not enough alumni responded to a survey that the Financial Times uses to create its list. The publication contacts alumni three years after they graduate, and, ordinarily, it requires that at least 20% of MBA alumni respond, with at least 20 completed surveys in total, the FT said online.

This year, due to COVID-19 disruptions, the FT lowered that threshold, but did not disclose exact numbers. Overall, the response rate to the 2023 alumni survey was 36%, the publication said.

In a statement, Wharton said that the FT informed them that they would not be included because of the lack of alumni responses.

“To confirm, Wharton provided the requested School-level survey data, as well as alumni contact information for the specified years, in accordance with our data and privacy policies,” Wharton’s statement read. “We also continued our practice of allowing the FT to conduct all alumni outreach related to their ranking.”

Overall, 142 schools participated, according to the FT. Its ranking uses 12 categories to score participating schools, and includes elements such as salary, value for money, research ranking, diversity, and sustainability.

Wharton is not the only school to not appear on an established ranking in recent months. In December, Penn’s Carey Law School announced that it would not submit data to U.S. News & World Report, calling the publication’s ranking methodology “unnecessarily secretive and contrary to important parts of our mission.”

Carey Law School joined Harvard and Yale schools in withdrawing from the U.S. News rankings. Those schools made headlines in November for refusing to participate, calling the publication’s rankings “profoundly flawed.”