The Wharton School is housed in Huntsman Hall.
Credit: Justin AbenojaThe Wharton School was No. 1 in the Financial Times’ 2025 list of the top-100 business schools with global MBA programs.
This year marks the second in a row that Wharton has topped the list. Columbia Business School in New York took second place on this year’s list, followed by IESE Business School in Spain.
The Feb. 16 rankings analyze 21 wide-ranging factors across 125 schools, including academic research output, alumni salaries, and the program’s carbon footprint. Alumni responses to surveys inform eight criteria, which account for 56% of the ranking. Data provided by the schools provides information for an additional 12 criteria, which make up 34% of the ranking. A school’s research rank, which is the final factor, accounts for the remaining 10%.
Wharton performed well in multiple metrics, despite a decline in the weighted salary calculation, which is found by dividing a program’s average alumni salary three years after completion by the total cost for the degree. According to the Financial Times’ methodology, the weighted salary of Wharton alumni fell from $245,772 in 2024 to $241,522 in 2025.
Wharton has also consistently placed in the top-five positions across other MBA ranking lists in the past two years. It placed No. 2 in the QS Global MBA Rankings and No. 4 in the Fortune rankings in 2025 and was No. 5 in Forbes’ 2024 rankings.
In September 2024, Wharton was No. 4 in LinkedIn’s annual MBA program ranking. The list ranks the top-100 business schools around the world based on how they prepare graduates for long-term career success. Wharton was also ranked No. 4 by LinkedIn in 2023.
In 2023, Wharton was excluded from the Financial Times’ 2023 list — its first absence in the list’s 25 years — following a failure from the school to reach the required alumni survey respondent threshold of 20%.
In the 2024-25 U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of MBA programs, Wharton tied with Stanford for No. 1, a rise from its previously held third-place spot in the 2023-24 list. That year, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business took the No. 1 spot.
In 2023, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the Perelman School of Medicine withdrew from participating in the U.S. News rankings. Both schools announced that they would no longer report data, citing concerns with the methodology of the rankings. Wharton has continued to submit data to U.S. News.
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