The Economist has released a ‘Potential to Network’ ranking. American business schools were well-represented in the top 10, holding six spots. But here’s something unexpected: Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Wharton, MIT Sloan, Columbia, and Tuck didn’t make the top 10.
It’S not what you know, it’s who you know. No business school would put it in quite this way, but elite schools are well aware that their alumni networks are a big selling point for prospective students—and advertise accordingly. Harvard Business School’s website, for example, promises “lifelong networking”. Yet while Ivy League schools are popular precisely because they are perceived to be among the best-connected, other factors also affect a school’s ability to open doors for its graduates.
The Economist’s annual ranking of business schools scores institutions on a range of criteria, from how much MBA graduates can expect to increase their salaries to the quality of the education. “Potential to network” is one such category, and a sub-ranking of the top ten schools on this measure is published below. Each school’s sub-ranking, in turn, is determined by its scores in three areas: the ratio of registered alumni to current students (the more alumni per student, the better); the number of countries in which a school has an alumni chapter; and students’ own perceptions of the effectiveness of the school’s alumni network.
The results are surprising. A mixture of well-known and less prominent schools jostle for position in the top ten, but some of the biggest American names are conspicuous by their absence. Top of the list is HEC Paris, which benefits from a large population of alumni relative to the size of its student intake, and which also has one of the most extensive networks of overseas alumni chapters. American schools fare relatively poorly on the latter indicator—perhaps a reflection of the fact that they tend to have proportionally fewer international students, meaning alumni are less likely to work abroad once they have graduated. (How long a domestic focus is tenable as global competition among business schools increases, and MBA graduates look further afield for potential employers, is unclear; indeed Yale School of Management has just made its MBA more globally focused.) Underlying European schools’ apparent proclivity for spreading their alumni-network tentacles more widely, a Belgian school, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, comes second in our sub-ranking.
| Rank | Business school | Top 100 rank | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HEC School of Management, Paris | 8 | France |
| 2 | Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School | 75 | Belgium |
| 3 | Thunderbird School of Global Management | 97 | United States |
| 4 | New York University – Leonard N Stern School of Business | 7 | United States |
| 5 | University of California at Berkeley – Haas School of Business | 3 | United States |
| 6 | University of Notre Dame – Mendoza College of Business | 38 | United States |
| 7 | Warwick Business School | 56 | United Kingdom |
| 8 | University of Southern California – Marshall School of Business | 63 | United States |
| 9 | Melbourne Business School – University of Melbourne | 27 | Australia |
| 10 | University of Virginia – Darden Graduate School of Business Administration | 4 | United States |
Note: The ranking aggregates, with equal weights, scores for: ratio of alumni to current students; number of countries (other than home country) in which a school has active alumni chapters; and student rating of extent/helpfulness of alumni network.