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First things first. This isn t an MBA ranking. It s a business school ranking for popularity.

There are many excellent MBA rankings (for full-time MBA, executive MBA, part-time MBA, specialty MBA rankings) published by the leading MBA related publications like Financial Times, Businessweek, The Economist, Poets Quants.

We weren t interested in presenting old wine in a new bottle. Instead, we have tried to create new wine and present it in a familiar looking bottle (i.e. the rankings format).

The MBA Crystal Ball Bschool Ranking is not about the biggest or the best business schools in the world (based on quality of teaching or diversity of the class profile). It s also not about the highest post-MBA salaries, the average GMAT scores or for that matter anything related to the specific degrees (MBA, MPhil, MFE, PhD) they award.

Those questions have already been addressed by others. At MBA Crystal Ball we are interested in finding out the answer to another question Which are the Most Popular Business Schools across the world?

For the scope of this bschool ranking, we restrict the definition of Popularity to the interest shown by prospective students, employers, professors, other stakeholders in the online properties of the bschool primarily its website and its social media presence (limited for now to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn).

The bschool rankings methodology we follow is quite simple. Like in a democratic election, we ve assumed that people have already voted for the most popular bschools schools. We ve just tapped into the publicly available data to form a perception about the level of popular interest in these business schools.

Which means no surveys, no questionnaires, no subjective or philosophical questions to answer and no sample size constraints. Instead of limiting ourselves to a few thousand participants, we are relying upon the collective wisdom and interest of hundreds of thousands of folks who have voted with their mouse clicks.

We consider aspects such as the overall website traffic and multiple parameters (followers, likes, interactions, online activity) that are relevant for the individual social media sites. We then use a little magic formula (consisting of weights, adjustments and penalties) to arrive at the overall bschool ranks.