In 2016, when Tim Stonemeijer went looking for an MBA program that put sustainability at the fore, he found slim pickings. Today the English-born entrepreneur and circular-economy champion sees a “candy shop” of business schools flying the sustainability banner.
The shift, while heartening, presents a challenge: how best to measure these programs’ commitment to sustainability and the impact they’re having on the world of business more broadly? For this year’s Better World MBA ranking, the Corporate Knights team considered two metrics: what is being taught and where graduates end up.
“Courses are the main input for an MBA program, and the impact that graduates have in the world is their main output,” says Corporate Knights CEO Toby Heaps. “If a business program is excelling on the sustainability dimension of these two measurements, it’s a strong signal they are leading the way fostering holistic business leaders of the future.”
Stonemeijer, who graduated from the University of Exeter’s Business School in 2018, may be one of them. He entered the program with five years’ experience in the fast fashion industry and a growing frustration with its priorities. He’d always had a thing against waste – in his early 20s, he and a carpenter friend launched a start-up, crafting wooden bow ties and tie clips out of offcuts from his friend’s workshop – and wanted to see genuine efforts to reduce it.
Courses are the main input for an MBA program, and the impact that graduates have in the world is their main output.
–Corporate Knights CEO Toby Heaps
“Sustainability is not just one way to approach business,” Stonemeijer says from his London office. “It is the only way.” He found a match in the Exeter program (which ranks 10th overall on the Top 40 and is in the top five for impact grads, see table below); all courses were taught through the lens of how to make business “not just less bad, but more good.” After graduating, he worked as a consultant on sustainable strategy in the retail and manufacturing sectors before joining the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity founded in 2010 by the eponymous sailboat racer who was prompted by her 2005 solo circumnavigation of the globe to dedicate her life to promoting waste reduction and the circular economy. Stonemeijer manages special projects for the foundation, in areas beyond the classic waste triumvirate of clothes, plastics and food. He says the MBA allowed him to reframe his focus, from one industry to innovation generally, while also introducing him to the foundation, which is part of Exeter’s network of partners.
Alyssa Stankiewicz also encountered her future employer while doing her MBA, at the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business. Raised Quaker in a small town in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, Stankiewicz did a degree in linguistics at a liberal arts college in Virginia before going to work for American Flatbread, a Vermont-based bakery and restaurant that champions local and organic food. For a decade, she baked, gardened and worked her way up to restaurant manager. She was impressed by how well the company treated its employees – offering kitchen staff weekly massage therapy, for instance – and by the central role it played in the community at large.
Interested in this business model, she enrolled in the Grossman program with a mind to possibly starting her own company. As a weaver, she was toying with the idea of an art therapy centre. Never in her wildest dreams did she imagine she would land where she has: working for the financial services company Morningstar, where she reviews portfolios, develops qualitative rating frameworks and works to improve transparency on sustainability funds.
Sustainability is not just one way to approach business. It is the only way.
–Tim Stonemeijer, University of Exeter Class of 2018 and special projects manager at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation
“I think about this work as serving my parents, who are not financial people,” she says on the phone from the Morningstar headquarters in Chicago. “Finance can feel exclusive and confusing. It needs someone to clean it up, to decipher the language.”
Stankiewicz attributes the unexpected twist in her career to the finance professors at Grossman, who persuaded her that she had a knack for analysis. With their encouragement, she entered an annual nationwide challenge issued by the renowned Wharton School, the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, to develop a hypothetical investment portfolio that adhered to several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Her group won. The program also introduced her to Morningstar, where she did the practicum that serves as the capstone of the Grossman MBA. She was surprised to discover that its mission – to ensure that everyday investors have the tools to understand where their money is going – aligned with her own values.
Together with Bard College in New York State, the Grossman School tops the Corporate Knights charts for alumni impact. Sanjay Sharma, dean of the Grossman program, says this is very much its goal: to have an impact not only on graduates, but also on their future employers.
As an example, he recalls a phone call he received in 2020 from Steve Phelps, then CEO of NASCAR (the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) and a Grossman alumnus. Phelps was looking for advice on how to respond to the discovery of a noose in the garage stall of Black driver Bubba Wallace at an Alabama speedway. The much-publicized incident unleashed a charged discussion about racism in the stock-car racing world.
I was starting to think about the bigger picture. I was looking for purpose.
–Jonaki Majumdar, Maastricht University School of Business and Economics Executive MBA Class of 2023, and global sustainability manager at Siegwerk
After much consideration, Phelps decided to make a plea for diversity and to ban the Confederate flag from all NASCAR racecourses: a controversial move that, Sharma says, ultimately resulted in a significant increase in race attendance. While acknowledging that NASCAR is an unlikely poster child for sustainability, Sharma cites the proverbial sustainability mountain.
“You have to take the first step, then you start to see opportunities,” he says from his office in Burlington, Vermont. In recent years, two other Grossman graduates have joined NASCAR, including the company’s current chief sustainability officer, who has committed to net-zero operating emissions by 2035.
Graduates cite the network of like-minded peers as one of the greatest benefits they derive from these MBA programs. “We have a common outlook,” says Jonaki Majumdar, describing her fellow students at the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics, the top European program in this year’s ranking. “We’re certainly not saints, but we’re also not selfish. We’re interested in the more altruistic side of life.”
Majumdar entered the Maastricht program as a self-described hard-core finance professional. With an undergraduate business degree and chartered accountant accreditation from her native Kolkata, she had worked as a risk-management and security consultant for several multinationals. She had been exposed to lots of money and power but felt that something was missing. “I was starting to think about the bigger picture,” she says from her home in the Dutch city of Utrecht. “I was looking for purpose.”
Maastricht’s MBA, which is offered in English and is available only to working professionals, is very international, with more than 15 nationalities represented in its present cohort. Ron Jacobs, the program’s executive director, characterizes sustainability as the “matrix” covering the entire curriculum, which is constantly expanding to incorporate new issues and understandings.
“Leadership is no longer about command and control,” Jacobs says, as an example. “It’s about employee health and creating a sustainable working environment.”
Majumdar is now sustainability manager for Siegwerk, a global ink and packaging firm based in Siegburg, Germany. She works on all aspects of the company’s sustainability strategy, including the circularity of its products, its carbon footprint and compliance with regulations across the many jurisdictions in which it operates. She finds the work vastly more rewarding than anything she did prior to the degree.
She describes the Maastricht MBA as the best life choice she’s ever made. “If I have one regret,” she says, “it’s that I didn’t do it earlier in my career.”
Given current trends, chances are that sooner than later, MBA programs that don’t teach through a sustainability lens will be the slimmer of the pickings.
Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.
2024 Better World MBA Top 40
| 2024 rank | 2023 rank | University | Country | Sustainable curriculum (100%) | Alumni impact (bonus 10%) | Final weighted score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Griffith Business School | Australia | 94% | 24% | 100%* |
| 2 | 5 | University of Vermont - Grossman School of Business | U.S. | 73% | 60% | 100% |
| 3 | 4 | Bard College | U.S. | 71% | 60% | 100% |
| 4 | 7 | Colorado State University College of Business | U.S. | 73% | 22% | 100% |
| 5 | 1 | Duquesne University - Palumbo-Donahue School of Business | U.S. | 69% | 20% | 96% |
| 6 | 3 | Maastricht University - School of Business and Economics | Netherlands | 68% | 19% | 94% |
| 7 | 27 | University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business | South Africa | 64% | 35% | 93% |
| 8 | 6 | Centrum PUCP Business School | Peru | 69% | 1% | 91% |
| 9 | 15 | University of Victoria - Peter B. Gustavson School of Business | Canada | 60% | 18% | 83% |
| 10 | 9 | University of Exeter Business School | U.K. | 57% | 26% | 81% |
| 11 | 11 | Warwick Business School | U.K. | 53% | 17% | 74% |
| 12 | 82 | American University - Kogod School of Business | U.S. | 53% | 12% | 72% |
| 13 | 16 | University of British Columbia - Sauder School of Business | Canada | 48% | 13% | 66% |
| 14 | 17 | La Trobe Business School | Australia | 41% | 33% | 61% |
| 15 | 13 | York University - Schulich School of Business | Canada | 44% | 7% | 60% |
| 16 | 29 | Glasgow Caledonian University Glasgow School for Business and Society | U.K. | 43% | 14% | 60% |
| 17 | 20 | Toronto Metropolitan University - Ted Rogers School of Management | Canada | 43% | 14% | 60% |
| 18 | 33 | Nottingham University Business School | U.K. | 44% | 2% | 59% |
| 19 | 23 | University of California at Berkeley - Haas School of Business | U.S. | 43% | 57% | |
| 20 | 12 | University of Winchester Business School | U.K. | 41% | 53% | |
| 21 | 14 | ESMT Berlin | Germany | 38% | 12% | 52% |
| 22 | 53 | International Institute for Management Development (IMD) | Switzerland | 36% | 16% | 51% |
| 23 | 18 | EADA Business School Barcelona | Spain | 36% | 7% | 49% |
| 24 | 25 | INSEAD | France | 36% | 3% | 48% |
| 25 | 42 | Gordon Institute of Business Science | South Africa | 36% | 1% | 47% |
| 26 | 22 | McGill University - Desautels Faculty of Management | Canada | 34% | 9% | 47% |
| 27 | 10 | Durham University Business School | U.K. | 33% | 12% | 46% |
| 28 | 37 | Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management | Belgium | 28% | 20% | 42% |
| 29 | 31 | Erasmus University - Rotterdam School of Management | Netherlands | 30% | 9% | 42% |
| 30 | 45 | University of Strathclyde - Strathclyde Business School | U.K. | 30% | 7% | 41% |
| 31 | 30 | Frankfurt School of Finance and Management | Germany | 29% | 8% | 40% |
| 32 | New | Keele University | U.K. | 30% | 39% | |
| 33 | 21 | King's College London | U.K. | 30% | 39% | |
| 34 | 50 | Mannheim Business School | Germany | 28% | 9% | 38% |
| 35 | 8 | TIAS School for Business and Society | Netherlands | 27% | 13% | 38% |
| 36 | 44 | HEC Montréal | Canada | 27% | 11% | 38% |
| 37 | 84 | Alliance Manchester Business School | U.K. | 28% | 36% | |
| 38 | 24 | Newcastle University Business School | U.K. | 25% | 10% | 35% |
| 39** | 38 | Iscte Business School | Portugal | 25% | 33% | |
| 39** | 120 | Nottingham Trent University - Nottingham Business School | U.K. | 25% | 33% |
*As scores are normalized against the top five, the top schools are tied. We used pre-normalized scores for ranking purposes.
**Schools are tied due to having the same final weighted score.
2024 Better World MBA - Top 10 Large Schools
| 2024 rank | School | Country | Average annual graduates* |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Colorado State University College of Business | U.S. | 178 |
| 2 | Centrum PUCP Business School | Peru | 744 |
| 3 | Warwick Business School | U.K. | 107 |
| 4 | University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business | Canada | 103 |
| 5 | York University Schulich School of Business | Canada | 318 |
| 6 | Toronto Metropolitan University Ted Rogers School of Management | Canada | 118 |
| 7 | International Institute for Management Development (IMD) | Switzerland | 96 |
| 8 | INSEAD | France | 1081 |
| 9 | Gordon Institute of Business Science | South Africa | 233 |
| 10 | Erasmus University Rotterdam School of Management | Netherlands | 132 |
*Average of 2022 and 2023 MBA graduates
Note: A large school is defined as an MBA program with over 80 graduates a year.
Methodology
The 2024 Corporate Knights Better World MBA Top 40 ranking examines the performances of 174 business schools, drawn from the most recent Financial Times list of the top-100 global MBA programs; the Princeton Review’s Best Green MBA list; the schools that made the 2023 Corporate Knights Better World top-40 roster; and business schools accredited by the Association of MBAs, the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) or the EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development) Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) and also signatories to the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education that opt in for evaluation. Based on publicly disclosed information on their websites, schools are evaluated on the sustainability content of their core courses and can review and request revisions to the analysis. Additionally, schools may voluntarily provide the number of recent graduates employed with impact organizations for up to a 10% alumni impact bonus to their overall score.