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Everyone agrees: The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania is the top business school in the world for research.
By “everyone,” we mean the two major rankings of business research institutions: The Financial Times‘s list, which was released in February as part of the British magazine’s annual Global MBA Ranking, and the newly released twin rankings from the University of Texas at Dallas Jindal School of Management.
The latter includes a both a North America and Worldwide ranking — both of which put Wharton at No. 1. So does FT, marking another clean sweep for the M7 B-school.
That has happened every year except 2023, when Wharton was absent from the FT list because it failed to reach the minimum threshold of responses to the magazine’s alumni survey.
The twin rankings released annually by UT-Dallas look at a school’s number of publications in 24 journals in a five-year span. And once again, one school dominates in this measure: In the most recent span from 2020 to 2024 (last year’s UT rankings were for 2019 to 2023, the year before that were for 2018 to 2022, etc.), Wharton had an incredible 409 articles, up from 392 in the rankings released in 2023, which itself was up from 380 articles in 2022, 353 articles in 2021, and 323 in 2020.
The No. 2 school in both the North American and Worldwide rankings was UT-Dallas itself — just as it was last year and the year before — with 323 articles, up from 297 (and 275 the year before). In third place in both UT rankings was Columbia Business School with 302 articles (up from 289), followed by Chicago Booth School of Business with 297 (278), swapping places this year with Harvard with 278 (279), to round out the top 5.
Wharton sweeping the honors once again this year makes sense: The University of Pennsylvania’s B-school is home to more than 20 research centers and initiatives, in every subject from analytics to public policy to social impact. Its scholarship generates new courses, programs, and partnerships between academics, industry, and government — all in the service of addressing pressing global business challenges. All this leads to a legendary reputation for Wharton’s research prowess.
But there are no research slouches in the FT or UT-Dallas rankings, especially not in the upper places. Columbia Business School, ranked No. 3 by UT and No. 2 by FT, has six major academic divisions from Accounting to Management to Marketing under which research is conducted, categorized, and published. Chicago Booth School of Business, ranked No. 4 by UT and tied with CBS at No. 2 on the FT list, has 13 centers and initiatives, including the Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership, the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation, and the renowned Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which runs one of the premier startup accelerators in the world. Harvard Business School, ranked No. 5 by both outlets, has 11 research centers and regional offices around the world; Cornell Johnson, ranked No. 6 last year by FT and No. 7 this year, as well as No. 12 in North America and No. 13 Worldwide in the UT rankings, boasts industry-leading centers like the Parker Center for Investment Research and the Smith Family Business Initiative.
UT-Dallas provides a tool to study research articles published in the leading business journals; that database contains author information on all research published since 1990. A single-authored article gets the author’s affiliated school a score of 1; the ranking addresses the issue of shared authorship by giving each school a score of p/n, where p is the number of authors from the same school and there are a total of n authors on the article.
If an author lists multiple schools, each of the schools that author is affiliated with gets a corresponding scaled score. For example, if one of the n authors lists m affiliations, each school that the author is affiliated with gets a score of 1/nm. In this way, Wharton achieved a score of 202.10, up from 197.25 but still below its mark of 204.86 in 2023 (when it was the only school to reach 200 points). For the 21 sets of years that UT-Dallas makes available for examining on its website, Wharton has been tops in every one.
The top 100 universities collectively contributed over 6,000 research papers during the period of 2020-2024, nearly doubling the output since the rankings began in 2005, according to the Texas-Dallas Jindal School. UT-Dallas this year scored 154.13, up from 142.70, followed by Columbia 142.22 (136.18), Chicago Booth 135.42 (127.16), and Harvard 127.49 (132.51). (See pages 2 and 3 for the complete 100-school UT-Dallas rankings.)
The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management is top non-U.S. school in the North American ranking at No. 16. McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management follows at No. 37. Eight Canadian schools are ranked; all the rest are U.S. schools, meaning Latin American schools were once again left out.
The top eight schools in both UT rankings in 2025 are U.S. B-schools, with the first deviation in the Worldwide ranking being INSEAD, of France, at No. 9, with 256 articles and 110.97 points. In 2024, as well, the top eight in both rankings were U.S. schools; INSEAD was ninth then, too, up from 11th the year before.
Thirteen countries are represented overall in the Worldwide ranking this year, with the United States leading with 64 B-schools, followed by China (10), the United Kingdom (eight), and Canada (five). Toronto Rotman is the highest-ranked Canadian B-school at No. 17; London Business School represents the UK at No. 20.
Several institutions made significant strides in the Worldwide rankings:
The FT ranking weighs the number of publications by a school’s current faculty in 50 academic and practitioner journals over a 30-month span. After Wharton, Columbia placed second this year, returning to the spot it held two years ago in Wharton’s absence. Columbia had fallen to fourth in 2024. Booth tied for second, same as last year, while HBS fell to fifth from second.
U.S. B-schools dominated this ranking as well, accounting for eight of the top 10 and 16 of the top 20 places. In all, 41 of the 100 ranked schools are in the U.S.
The top non-U.S. schools are INSEAD at No. 4, London Business School at No. 9, and Toronto Rotman at No. 12. The UK is home to 11 ranked schools, second among all represented countries, with France next (eight schools, including INSEAD at No. 4 and HEC Paris at No. 40), and India also at eight schools, though the South Asian country’s representatives were all in the lower half of the ranking: The top Indian B-school is the Indian School of Business at No. 64.
China, meanwhile, had schools in the FT ranking, led by China Europe International Business School at No. 42. Hong Kong had three ranked B-schools, led by HKU Business School at No. 18.
See the next pages for the complete 100-school rankings by UT and FT. Visit the UT ranking website here. See FT’s ranking here.
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The Top 100 Business Schools In 2025, Ranked By Research – Poets&Quants
