Here's How We Came Up With Our List Of The World's Best Business Schools

For our fifth annual list of the World's Best Business Schools, we conducted a survey that asked thousands of real professionals around the world to rank the world's best business schools.

This year, nearly 10,000 readers voted and ranked Harvard the world's best business school.

Survey participants rated the reputation of the graduates from top business schools around the world on a scale of poor to excellent (1 to 5), with the percentage of excellent ratings used as a tiebreaker.

We only included responses from professionals who said they had experience hiring MBAs at least half the time. We also filtered the data to obtain better geographical balance.

Nearly 60% of respondents said that they have an MBA or comparable business degree. Respondents work in a variety of fields, including finance (39%), tech (20%), consulting (13%), media and marketing (8%), and more. See the full breakdown below:

In response to the question, "In your opinion, how important is it to have an MBA in your industry?," 20% of respondents said that an MBA is "extremely important," 31% responded that it is "very important," and 32% said that it's "moderately important." Only 5% of respondents said that an MBA is "not important at all."

When we added the filter of only including responses from people who have MBAs, the results were similar, but these respondents seem to stress the value of an MBA even more, with 24% saying that an MBA is "extremely important," 38% saying that it is "very important," and 30% saying that it is moderately important.

Forty-two percent of respondents said a network of contacts is the most valuable asset business school provides, while 36% of respondents said that "skills and knowledge" is the biggest benefit of an MBA. This chart shows how respondents answered this question:

When we filtered the data to only include responses from people who have MBAs, the answers to this question changed, with 43% saying that "skills and knowledge" is the biggest benefit of having an MBA and 37% responding to that question with "network of contacts." Here are the results of the same question, with the filter of MBA applied:

Now read the full list of the World's Best Business Schools.