School of Management jumps
in global ranking—but why?

When Financial Times released its annual ranking of the world's business schools this week, it called Yale "one of the most notable climbers." The Yale School of Management jumped four spots from last year, to number ten—its first time in the top ten in seven years.

But why?

In a post called "How Yale SOM Climbed Into The Top Ten," the website Poets & Quants—which covers all b-schools, all the time—takes a close look. But the article doesn't quite deliver on the headline's promise. The bottom line: "it’s hard to say with real certainty why Yale is back in The Financial Times’ Top Ten."

The post is worth reading, however. It notes the complexity of FT's ranking system and observes that Yale's scores dropped from last year's in nine of the magazine's 20 categories. SOM shone on the global metrics, but those account for only 20 percent of the overall methodology, according to Poets & Quants.

Struggling to explain why Yale ascended so sharply, the website posits: "Perhaps it’s because each school’s underlying index scores—which The FT does not reveal—are so close to each other as to be meaningless."

Which is not to say SOM remains stagnant. But "most of its improvements are not captured by the FT ranking," Poets & Quants says.

Those include a new, experienced leadership team, exceptionally bright students with impressive GMAT scores (714) and undergraduate GPAs (3.57), a highly innovative integrated curriculum, one of the lowest student-faculty ratios of any top business school, the creation of that unique global partnership that has brought more international focus to SOM, and a brand new and wonderfully impressive $243 million home.

"Yale SOM may very well deserve to be one of the Top Ten institutions in the world that grant an MBA degree," the site concludes—"but mostly for reasons that aren’t entirely measured by The Financial Times."