RELEASED: 2015 Best Business Schools for Public Institutional Investors

Posted on 04/02/2015


Best Business Schools MBA

Brief Summary

Since our last issue, SWFI has engaged in an ambitious research project developing a rankings table specifically geared toward the top business schools for public investors. The inspiration for the project came from our fund profiles. What we noticed was, along with the top accustomed schools, several prominent executives came from smaller universities, or schools with unfamiliar names. This piqued our curiosity about who was really managing these funds, and where they were educated. There are countless rankings lists that sort schools by the number of programs they have or their cost to attend, but there has never been a ranking that incorporated the number of graduates that went on to manage public money.

Although other lists are a good start to give a graduate an idea about where to study, we wanted to focus on outcomes – ostensibly the most important factor in determining whether to attend a business school. Thus, although we too considered factors such as acceptance rate, and student-faculty ratio, a much heavier weighting was placed on the number of graduates that appeared at the highest levels of sovereign wealth funds, public pensions, endowments, central banks and other public funds.

For a career in public finance, the following schools are the top 30 in the world…

Rank Name Graduate School Name
1 Stanford University Stanford Graduate School of Business
2 Harvard University Harvard Business School
3 University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business
4 The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
5 Columbia University Columbia Business School
6 University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business
7 Yale University Yale School Of Management
8 University of London London School of Economics
9 McGill University Desautels Faculty of Management
10 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management
11 Stockholm School of Economics* Stockholm School of Economics
12 University of London London Business School
13 Norwegian School of Economics Norwegian School of Economics
14 Western University (Ontario) Ivey Business School
15 Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
16 New York University Stern School of Business
17 York University Schulich School Of Business
18 Duke University Fuqua School of Business
19 Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management
20 UCLA Anderson School Of Management
21 City University of London Cass Business School
22 Boston University Boston University School of Management
23 University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business
24 University of Toronto Rotman School of Management
25 Universita Bocconi SDA Boccini School of Management
26 American University Kogod School of Business
27 University of Missouri Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business
28 Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
29 Aalto University Helsinki School of Economics
30 Louisiana State University E.J. Ourso College of Business

 

Methodology
The largest factor in the rankings was the number of public institutional investor executives who attended the business school. Other quantitative factors include school acceptance rates, faculty-to-student ratio and rejection rate. SWFI editorial staff had final say on the rankings. The sample size of public institutional investor executives was 300. 62% of the sample were from pension funds and public funds, while 48% were from sovereign wealth funds. Common job titles were chief investment officer, president, senior vice president and director.

Lead SWFI Analysts: Jonathan Smith and Hongzi Jin

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