But a diverting ranking nevertheless…
I first picked up on this one over four years ago in a rather dismissive post. It’s an exciting league table which aims to reflect the contributions of universities to educating the world’s top chief executives. Produced by the Ecole des Mines de Paris, or MINES ParisTech as they seem to prefer these days, it sets out to be an “INTERNATIONAL PROFESSIONAL RANKING OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS”.
The latest edition of the MINES ParisTech league table is based on the achievement of graduates in the highest roles in the top companies and the methodology is pretty straightforward:
The academic career for qualification in higher education of “top executives” (subsequently referred to as CEOs) has been redefined and, for each person in question, a point has been awarded to each of the various institutions which contributed to their higher education.
(Note that where the individual studied at more than one institution, the point has been divided up amongst the contributors.)
The points awarded to each institution for all of the 500 CEOs are then added up, so as to classify the range of institutions having contributed to the graduate training of one or several CEOs of the 500 companies listed by Fortune Global 500. In 2010, the 500 companies of Fortune Global 500 were run by 508 people (eight companies had two leaders). We were able to obtain information on the higher education career of 487 of the 508 CEOs. For the other 21 (i.e. 4.1% of the total number), it was not possible to reconstitute any aspect of their academic career. For five CEOs, the assessment was only partial. Lastly, 13 CEOs had not pursued any higher education studies.
All clear and uncontroversial I would have thought
Sadly, MINES ParisTech itself falls just outside the top 20.
1 Harvard University
2 Tokyo University
3 Keio University
4 HEC (France)
5 Kyoto University
5 University of Oxford
7 Ecole Polytechnique
8 Waseda University
9 ENA (France)
10 Seoul National University
11 University of Pennsylvania
12 Columbia University
13 Stanford University
13 Tohoku University
13 University of Nottingham
16 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
17 Institute for Study of Politics – Paris
18 University St Gallen
19 University Sao Paulo
19 Northwestern University
The other UK showings are Cambridge at 30 and Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow at 38. Over 100 universities are tied in 92nd place with 1 point each which does kind of undermine the lower end of the table somewhat. Good showing for Japanese universities though with four places in the top 10
