QS MBA by Career Specialization Rankings Methodology

The 2021 QS MBA by Specialization Rankings builds upon the 2021 QS Global MBA Ranking by empowering candidates to consider MBA programs from a specific career outcome perspective. We closely look at the following indicators across 7 industrial and functional specializations. The ranking publishes the top 100 ranked MBA institutes in the respective specializations and covers study opportunities from more than 20 different countries and 80 cities.

Data Collection

Data is collected from the long-standing QS Global Employer Survey, QS Business School Survey and Elsevier’s Scopus database, the world’s largest repository of academic journal data.

Methodology

The 2021 QS MBA by Specialization Rankings are made up of three broad categories, which are comprised of 6 indicators that are weighted differently based on the specialization in question.

Career Placements is represented by a score that combines insights on the percent of graduates from an MBA program going into a relevant industry, function or starting their own business. This is balanced by an absolute placement score, which balances class size against the proportional outcome statistics.The employment outcome data conforms to the MBA Career Services & Employer Alliance (CSEA), Standards Edition VI, for reporting MBA employment statistics. The employment information includes all students who graduated in the 12 months ending in June 30. This category aims to measure the career outcomes of respective specializations in the business schools ranked.

• Employer Reputation is derived from responses to the last five years of our prestigious QS Global Employer Survey, with the most recent years weighted higher. Our Employer Reputation metric is based on almost 37,000 responses to our QS Employer Survey and asks employers to identify those institutions from which they source the most competent, innovative, effective graduates. Our survey responses quantify the importance of various MBA specializations and skillsets, as well as the relevance of specific functions in the hiring process. This category measures the employer reputation of specific business schools based on how important a given specialization is to the company in question.

• Research Strength is a combination between the Full-time MBA research and the Specialization MBA research, the with former weighted 50% and the latter weighted 50%. Both scores are calculated from SCOPUS data on research productivity, based on 4.3 million total citations, from 2013 to 2018, attributed to nearly 3,000 universities and business schools for subjects relevant to specific MBA specializations. The category aims to measure how strongly each school in the targeted business discipline is associated with respective specialization.

Finally, the combined final score of the noted indicators are weighted alongside the overall score from the most recent global MBA ranking, which contributes 25% to the final specialization score displayed in the 2021 QS MBA by Specialization Rankings.

Indicator Weights

The specialization weights associated with the indicators noted above vary by specialization according to data relevance and availability. The specific inputs used to derive scores are written in details in subject-specific methodology. We have given different weights to indicators to reflect the industrial or functional or entrepreneurial nature of the career choices, and to distinguish the seven specialization subjects from one another.