WashU Olin firmly in top 30 with new P&Q composite ranking

WashU Olin maintained its hold in the top 30 of US full-time MBA programs in the latest Poets & Quants ranking.

Olin’s placement came in spite of a fairly substantial shakeup in the publication’s methodology.

Olin’s Full-Time MBA program came in at No. 28, down from 23rd in the previous ranking. The P&Q ranking is an aggregate of five other rankings from business publications or websites. P&Q assigns different weights to each of the five component rankings.

Those include US News & World Report (weighted at 35% of the total); the Financial Times (30%); Bloomberg Businessweek (15%); LinkedIn (10%); and The Princeton Review (10%).

Instead of merely averaging the five lists, each ranking is separately weighted to account for our view of their credibility.  

—Poets & Quants

The big change? P&Q’s ranking previously included The Economist and Forbes—which no longer produce MBA rankings. LinkedIn and The Princeton Review are new components of Poets & Quants’ aggregate ranking. Indeed, LinkedIn is brand new to the ranking business.

“This year’s addition of two new rankings does cause more substantial shifts in rankings that will, no doubt, raise eyebrows,” P&Q wrote. Ironically, P&Q included the LinkedIn ranking after referring to it in their own coverage as “a good idea that squanders its credibility by overlooking the most fundamental part of any comparison: transparency.”

Olin came in at No. 25 in LinkedIn’s debut ranking.

While WashU stayed relatively steady in the 2023 P&Q ranking, the new methodology created shock waves when, for example, Wharton fell to 31st and other MBA powerhouses such as Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg and MIT Sloan slipped out of the P&Q top 10.

WashU Olin was affected, too, by the effect of changes to the underlying rankings. For example, US News significantly changed its methodology in its latest ranking, contributing to a slide to 37th place there—yet that ranking commands more than a third of P&Q’s ranking.

Meanwhile, P&Q weighted Businessweek’s ranking more heavily—a ranking in which Olin also slipped. Additionally, WashU Olin wasn’t ranked in The Princeton Review.