Leading companies around the world are rapidly coming to the conclusion that operating a business focused solely on short-term, shareholder-driven profits will not be viable in the future. Governments and stock exchanges are tightening disclosure requirements on social and environmental indicators, while young graduates entering the workforce search for businesses that are making a positive impact on the world. A report for the Rio+20 climate change conference last year, “Leadership in a Rapidly Changing World,” interviewed top CEOs from multinational firms to determine what skills they are looking for when hiring. The overwhelming conclusion was that what’s needed are business leaders who are interested in addressing global challenges when creating value for their company.

In an important institutional shift, various MBA accreditation bodies have also begun to acknowledge this new paradigm. Earlier this year, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, along with the European Foundation for Management Development, signed a long-term partnership with the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (GRLI). The goal, according to GRLI director general Eric Cornuel, is to foster responsibility and sustainability in business education. “GRLI will become the armed wing of our shared ambitions at EFMD and AACSB to accelerate change,” he announced in a press release.

One institution that has yet to evolve, however, is the business of business school rankings. Students examine yearly MBA rankings from top publications such as The Economist and the Financial Times to help determine which programs to attend, while companies use it for recruitment purposes. Each ranking is slightly different, but they all end up rewarding programs that place graduates in the highest-paying jobs possible. The one international ranking that focused instead on sustainability, the Aspen Institute’s Beyond Grey Pinstripes ranking, was suspended last year. It was with the intent of filling this important void that Corporate Knights decided to expand its annual sustainable Canadian MBA ranking globally this year.

The list of schools contacted by Corporate Knights was derived from the top international MBA rankings currently in circulation. The goal was to identify which of these programs – viewed as leaders in the field – are leading the pack on sustainable business education. Schools that wished to participate were sent a survey that asked detailed questions related to institutional support offered to MBA candidates and relevant student-led initiatives on campus, along with coursework dedicated to social or environmental impact management and/or non-profit management.

The Schulich School of Business at York University was the top-ranked program this year. Although strong in every category, it also managed to receive the only perfect grade in one of the three categories: institutional support. It boasts five institutes focused on everything from business ethics to building sustainable enterprises, while at least 10 professors published relevant papers in academic journals last year. Students are offered internships and consulting programs at a range of businesses focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and non-profit management.

In second place is the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University. Leading the way in student participation, the John Molson Sustainable Business Group and the Women in Business Club are some of many avenues available for MBA candidates to get involved on campus. The business responsibility oath is a voluntary student-led pledge taken by MBA graduates to commit towards the creation of value “responsibly and ethically.”

The program in third place is the University of Exeter Business School. Working with the World Wildlife Fund, the One Planet MBA program was established in 2011 with the goal of producing business leaders focused on preserving our natural environment. As a result, the curriculum was the strongest found among all programs ranked.

In previous years we received some feedback in regards to our survey placing smaller programs at a disadvantage. The student participation category, in particular, rewarded institutions with larger numbers of students. Keeping this in mind, we also produced a list of the Top 10 smallest programs this year (where there are fewer than 50 graduates). The University of Exeter came first, followed closely by the American schools Duquesne University and the University of Oregon.

The results, involving programs from 14 different countries, displayed several interesting regional trends. Although Canadian schools made up three of the top five programs, the results grew more diverse further down the list. The United States had 11 programs in the top 30, followed by Britain with three. France and Australia both had two programs. The highest-ranked schools found in Asia were the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, followed by the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University. Although extensive efforts were made to reach out to more Asian programs, participation was low, making it difficult to extrapolate broader regional trends from that area.

Upon examination, there are several different methods for incorporating sustainability currently being pursued in business education. As all programs in the ranking are ones submitted for scrutiny, there is an acknowledgement that these are faculties leading the way on this new form of business education. Certainly, there are many programs that have yet to make this pivot, and that for the most part were not a part of our survey this year.

Faculties like the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University and the Copenhagen Business School have moved towards embracing an integrated approach to management. At McGill there is an institute specifically dedicated to developing this method of education. It is described as “one that breaks down disciplinary barriers, embraces multiple perspectives and encourages holistic, context-sensitive thinking about organizations.” The institute’s educational priorities are social well-being, sustainability and health.

As our ranking was originally conceived to mark traditional MBA programs that offer both core and elective courses, programs that only offered a core/integrated curriculum were disadvantaged. To allow for different methods of sustainability education, an integrated management question was added to the survey this year.

Another technique that is becoming more prevalent is an MBA entirely dedicated to sustainability. A prime example is the University of Exeter, where a previously conventional faculty was overhauled with the assistance of civil society and management experts to focus on corporate social responsibility, sustainability and non-profit education. The Audencia Nantes School of Management is currently undergoing this transition. Over the past several years, the curriculum has been overhauled so that each class dedicates a minimum of 10 per cent of its coursework towards CSR and sustainability. Starting next year the program will be called the MBA in Responsible Management, and will be designed to “attract students wishing to follow a quality generalist MBA which places the notion of responsibility at the heart of its philosophy.”

The third approach remains the most popular model, which is tweaking the existing MBA program so that sustainability is a strong element woven throughout the educational experience. Most of the schools in our ranking this year favour this strategy, including the School of Management at Boston University and the Central European University Business School. The faculty will add a handful of relevant core courses into the curriculum, to ensure that every student receives a foundation in sustainability, ethics, non-profit management and CSR. A number of elective courses are offered for those more interested in a specific stream, such as co-operative business management, and individual professors remain the catalysts for further integration of sustainability into the program.

The report for the Rio+20 climate change conference has a timeline detailing shifting ideas about business leadership since the birth of the MBA in the late 19th century. The 1950s-1960s was the dominant period for the rational manager, while the 1990s-2000s was the era of relational leadership. The theme for the 21st century? A generation of global citizens, where shifting power structures means that success entails partnering with others to lead systemic change in society.

A cartoon in the Financial Times earlier this year showed an eager MBA candidate at a job interview. She looks across the table and tells the interviewer: “I may not be the employee you want, but I’m the one my business school thinks you need.”

In other words, business education is still playing catch-up.

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US News’ full-time MBA ranking is largely focused on a quality assessment of the MBA program. The survey is filled out by deans, directors, and recruiters based on their conception of the quality of the school and its graduates. A significant percentage of the weighting is placed on alumni salary. Students entering the non-profit sector will typically earn less after graduating, and lower the average alumni earning score for the program. Schools are thus penalized for having a high percentage of alumni interested in this type of non-profit work. This is also the case for the Economist’s full-time MBA ranking.

The Financial Times full-time MBA ranking accounts for this by eliminating these students’ salary from the averaging process; However, faculty initiatives such as loan forgiveness for students doing work in this field are not currently rewarded in any of these scoring matrices.

Rather than focusing on alumni salary, we have decided to look at faculty support in the form of loan forgiveness, grants, and scholarships for students and graduates who have decided to do work in the non-profit sector. Schools are rewarded for promoting this type of work, rather than for producing graduates in the most lucrative industries.

Another criticism of full-time MBA rankings is their reliance on subjective third party actors to rate or provide information about the quality of each program. US News’ survey asks the deans and directors of business schools, and corporate recruiters, to rate each MBA program. Similarly, Bloomberg asks company recruiters to fill out a survey concerning the quality of graduates from schools they have recruited from in the past. Focusing on recruiter satisfaction adds valuable information regarding the success of the program in preparing graduates for the job market; however, this strategy also creates significant potential for bias in the results.

Executives/recruiters may be basing their scoring on preconceived notions of the school, and/or the quality of only a handful of graduates who they have worked with in the past, rather than providing an objective source of information that is relevant to the current state of the program. Additionally, larger schools will produce more graduates, who are likely to have a stronger more visible presence in the work force.

In order to address these issues, we are relying on faculty management staff to complete the survey. The survey responses are then made public on our website to promote honesty and reduce the potential for bias. Understanding that smaller programs should be assessed on their own merits, and the difficulties that come with successfully comparing large and small programs, we have decided to produce a top 10 list which recognizes the leading green MBA programs with under 50 graduates.

Global Green MBA Vs Beyond Grey Pinstripes

The Aspen Institute’s Beyond Grey Pinstripes survey was one of the first surveys to bring deserved attention to schools that are working to push the green agenda forward. Our methodology, originally inspired by the BGP study, has been modified over the years to improve and streamline our analysis, and to accommodate the more holistic approach institutions are now taking to integrating sustainability in all aspects of the MBA experience.

Beyond Grey Pinstripes ranked participating schools by quantifying the amount of coursework and faculty research with a focus in sustainability. While we maintain faculty research, and coursework as important parts of our scoring system, we have expanded the methodology to base scoring on a wide range of faculty- and student-led initiatives.

In our ‘Institutional support’ category, we have incorporated the following categories into our scoring matrix:

Number of external guest speakers and events, orientation activities, internships and consulting programs, loan forgiveness and scholarships, student competitions, faculty led community involvement, endowed faculty chairs, institutes and centres, and faculty research.

Beyond Grey Pinstripes requested this information, but did not allocate points for these categories and thus performance in these areas did not affect a school’s rank.

We have also developed a ‘Student-led initiatives’ category in which we allocate points for student groups, consulting clubs, faculty groups, and student committees/task forces.

With the addition of the ‘Integrated Management’ question in the coursework category this year, the survey also provides and opportunity for schools to gain points for integrating sustainability into the MBA curriculum in a systemic manner.

Outreach and Eligibility

To begin the project, researchers sent an invitation for participation to over 250 of the top ranked business schools around the world. Our outreach was based on the following rankings:

Top 100 MBA programs in the Economist’s list of full-time MBA programs, 2012

Top 100 MBA programs in Financial Time’s list of full-time MBA programs 2012

Top 100 MBA programs in Beyond Grey Pinstripe’s ranking, 2012

Top 104 MBA programs in US News’ list of full-time MBA programs, 2012

Top 63 MBA programs in Bloomberg Businessweek’s list of full-time MBA programs, 2012

Top 15 Canadian MBA programs in Corporate Knight’s Knight School ranking, 2012

Select signatories of the Principles for Responsible Management Education

These institutions hold major accreditations, and/or are renowned as leaders in sustainable business education within their region.

Data collection and Survey Design

The Global Green MBA Survey was distributed to those institutions that agreed to participate, and faculty members were given two months to complete the document. Schools that did not agree to participate in the study were excluded from the ranking entirely. The survey is used to collect data within the timeframe of September 2012 – August 2013.

The Background Information portion of the survey asks schools to list the following:

Number of fill-time students enrolled in the MBA program

Number of full-time students graduating from the MBA program

Number of teaching and research faculty

Length of program

Number of courses, credits, and credit hours.

This information was used to determine program size, and if the program would be considered for the Top 10 small programs ranking.

Each school also provided a narrative describing the how the MBA program prepares students to be leaders in sustainability, ethics, environmental stewardship, and/or CSR in the global corporate environment which is displayed in the institution’s online profile.

The survey was designed to evaluate the performance of each program in 3 categories:

1. Institutional Support

The first category of the survey evaluates the ability of the MBA faculty to encourage sustainability in the academic experience by examining activities and initiatives in the following sub-categories: External guest speakers and events, internships and consulting programs, loan forgiveness and scholarships, student competitions, faculty-led community involvement, endowed faculty chairs, institutes and centres, and faculty research.

2. Student-Led Initiatives

In this category, we evaluate how sustainability is being fostered by the student body in the form of student groups, consulting clubs, faculty groups, and student committees/task forces.

3. Coursework

The final category evaluates the integration of sustainability into the curriculum. Schools are asked to provide a list of required and elective courses that are fully or partially dedicated to sustainability concepts, joint degrees and/or degree specializations, and to explain their approach to the systemic integration of sustainability into all aspects of the masters program.

4. Data Cleaning and Validation

Each completed survey was reviewed upon submission in order to verify that all questions had been answered correctly, that each response was supported with the requested links and documentation, and that the responses did not contain any obvious errors. Researchers also fact checked the survey information with that which is available on the program website. Any missing information or issues with the survey were noted, and the document was returned to the faculty contact to make the adjustments necessary for us to proceed with the marking process.

The names of each school and associated faculty were blocked out for the remainder of the marking process to avoid bias.

Scoring

A list of keywords and terms was used to evaluate the relevance of each response to social responsibility and environmental sustainability. A point was allocated for each response that met the question criteria. Scores for each survey question were inputted into an excel spreadsheet, and final scores were calculated based on the weighting scheme described below.

Institutional Support: 30%

Student-led Initiatives: 25%

Coursework: 45%

Limitations:

We have done our best to include a diverse range of factors pertaining to all aspects of the MBA program in our survey in order to produce a ranking that is as accurate and objective as possible. The ranking model is, however, limited to quantifiable data and is thus unable to fully capture the MBA experience. By providing the initiatives and information in each school’s profile, we hope that we have produced a tool that aids students in choosing a program that fits best with their individual objectives.

Here, we would like to note the limitations of our methodology, and touch on a number of areas we hope to improve upon on in the future.

We think it is important to capture the opinions of MBA students themselves, in order to gain a further understanding of what is important to them in a program, and what needs to be improved. We would like to add a section of the survey that is based on student responses, where we ask students to assess the program quality and express their satisfaction with the program in covering in covering sustainability-related issues. A good example of this is the Business as Unusual study.

A number of institutions have recommended that we assess alumni groups dedicated to helping students to network and find jobs in the non-profit and or/social enterprise sectors. These groups would have a significant impact on the employment rate and overall success of graduates making the transition to a career in the field of sustainability.

We would also like to look at the amount of grant money awarded to schools for sustainability-minded research and development, as we believe this may be an indicator of the quality and amount of sustainability research being produced by the institution.

The current structure of the survey only allows sustainability-focused courses that are offered on a bi-annual schedule to be included in alternating years of the survey. We would like to find a way to give partial marks for courses offered during off years.

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