The top 10 B-school alumni networks

The Economist has released a ‘Potential to Network’ ranking. American business schools were well-represented in the top 10, holding six spots. But here’s something unexpected: Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Wharton, MIT Sloan, Columbia, and Tuck didn’t make the top 10.

It’S not what you know, it’s who you know. No business school would put it in quite this way, but elite schools are well aware that their alumni networks are a big selling point for prospective students—and advertise accordingly. Harvard Business School’s website, for example, promises “lifelong networking”. Yet while Ivy League schools are popular precisely because they are perceived to be among the best-connected, other factors also affect a school’s ability to open doors for its graduates.

The Economist’s annual ranking of business schools scores institutions on a range of criteria, from how much MBA graduates can expect to increase their salaries to the quality of the education. “Potential to network” is one such category, and a sub-ranking of the top ten schools on this measure is published below. Each school’s sub-ranking, in turn, is determined by its scores in three areas: the ratio of registered alumni to current students (the more alumni per student, the better); the number of countries in which a school has an alumni chapter; and students’ own perceptions of the effectiveness of the school’s alumni network.

The results are surprising. A mixture of well-known and less prominent schools jostle for position in the top ten, but some of the biggest American names are conspicuous by their absence. Top of the list is HEC Paris, which benefits from a large population of alumni relative to the size of its student intake, and which also has one of the most extensive networks of overseas alumni chapters. American schools fare relatively poorly on the latter indicator—perhaps a reflection of the fact that they tend to have proportionally fewer international students, meaning alumni are less likely to work abroad once they have graduated. (How long a domestic focus is tenable as global competition among business schools increases, and MBA graduates look further afield for potential employers, is unclear; indeed Yale School of Management has just made its MBA more globally focused.) Underlying European schools’ apparent proclivity for spreading their alumni-network tentacles more widely, a Belgian school, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, comes second in our sub-ranking.

That said, when the students themselves are asked to rank the effectiveness of alumni networks, familiar names come out best. Students consider American schools such as Dartmouth Tuck, Stanford, Cornell, Michigan Ross and Harvard to have the best alumni networks (see table, “Friends in high places”). A caveat is that students can only assess the network of the school they attended, and so cannot directly compare it with the networks of other schools.There may also be an element of confirmation bias, in which students justify to themselves the expense of an MBA at an elite school by reassuring themselves of its benefit to their careers. Still, if the adage that the customer is always right applies, in a brand-conscious market it seems clear that MBA students know what they want.

Top ten business schools, ranked by ‘potential to network’

Note: The ranking aggregates, with equal weights, scores for: ratio of alumni to current students; number of countries (other than home country) in which a school has active alumni chapters; and student rating of extent/helpfulness of alumni network.