Any successful transition to a low-carbon economy will be arduous and disruptive, a journey that is likely to produce a long line of both winners and losers. The business community is itself poised to go through a period of dramatic transformation. Those best equipped to embrace this cleaner form of capitalism will be able to harness private sector capital and ingenuity to succeed under this new paradigm.

Setting up our future business leaders with the skills and training necessary to flourish in the decades ahead is the first step in this process. Business schools remain the training grounds for these future business leaders, with roughly 40 per cent of the S&P 500 CEOs equipped with an MBA.

While there are many business rankings that focus on how they can help graduates make more money, The Better World MBA Ranking aims to identify which MBAs best prepare graduates to change the world for the better and succeed in this shifting business climate. As the march to a more inclusive, socially, and ecologically just form of capitalism gathers steam, it is our hope that these new graduates will not only produce the highest returns for society and the planet, but they will also be handsomely rewarded by the market for doing so.

How to measure the “better world” component of an MBA has proven to be an inexact science. After more than a decade of running MBA rankings on the topic, we have learned three important lessons regarding our methodology.

• Provide a clear vision on the goal of the ranking.
• Keep it simple, transparent, and objective.
• Do not make the ranking dependent on schools having to fill out yet another survey.

The research focus is now oriented around which MBA programs offer the best package of core courses, research and support centres to foster the most comprehensive sustainability-oriented learning experience. These numbers were only taken from publicly available sources.

The Schulich School of Business at York University was the top-ranked program this year, continuing a 12-year reign on top of our rankings. It earned a high grade in all three evaluated categories with a final score of 88 per cent, including a heavy sustainability research focus among the faculty at large.

That was followed by the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, a program that has successfully reorganized itself in recent years around the more holistic concept of “integrated management.”

The Copenhagen Business School rounded out the top three, after finishing 10th in our 2013 ranking. It supports an impressive ecosystem of institutes and centres, including a sustainability-oriented Center for Leisure and Culture Services and a CSR-focused Centre for Business and Development Studies. It is also home to 180 Degrees Consulting, the world’s largest university-based consultancy dedicated to improving the effectiveness of non-profits and social enterprises around the world.

Several notable regional trends did emerge when examining the Top 40 Better World MBA programs. Fifty-five per cent of the schools were from North America, including an impressive nine schools from Canada. European schools made up 33 per cent of the remainder, followed by a handful of schools from Asia, Africa and Australia.

South Korea’s KAIST business school was the top-ranked program outside of North America and Europe, finishing fourth overall.

Future business leaders will be tasked with integrating social and environmental factors into their everyday business decisions, whether it’s how to do full cost accounting, build inclusive leadership and governance structures or practice ethical marketing.

MBA programs have a long way to go, but these top schools are – compared to their peers – tops at teaching corporate leaders of tomorrow how to hit the ground running.

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The 2015 Corporate Knights Better World MBA Ranking schools were assessed on three indicators: curriculum, institutes & centres and faculty research. Data for these three indicators was collected from publicly available sources. Outreach was conducted to each of those schools for verification and confirmation prior to completion of the ranking.

1.     Curriculum: Only core/required courses fully dedicated to sustainability were counted under the scoring. (maximum 5 courses, 30 per cent weighting)

2.     Institutes & Centres: Only relevant institutes affiliated to the business school regardless of location, sponsored or ran in partnership with another school, were counted towards the scoring. (maximum 5 institutes and centres, 20 per cent weighting)

3.     Faculty Research: All research was conducted using the business school’s website and Google Scholar. All relevant peer-reviewed publications in academic journals were considered between 2012 and 2014. Thirty per cent of the final score was derived from total number of relevant publications authored or co-authored per faculty member of a given business school (maximum total published work: faculty ratio of 1:1, 30 per cent weighting). The other 20 per cent is in relation to the total number of times those publications were cited (maximum average citations=10, 20 per cent weighting).

Methodology rationale:

A great society is a society in which its business leaders think greatly of their functions.

Business schools are the training grounds for future business leaders. While there are many business rankings that focus how they can help graduates make more money, The Better World MBA Ranking aims to identify which MBAs best equip graduates to change the world for the better. As the march to a more inclusive, socially, and ecologically just form of capitalism gathers steam, it is our hope that these new graduates will not only produce the highest returns for society and the planet, but they will also be handsomely rewarded by the market for doing so.

How to measure the “better world” component of an MBA is an inexact science. After a decade of running MBA rankings on the topic, we have learned some important lessons:

1. Provide a clear vision on the goal of the ranking.
2. Keep it simple, transparent, and objective.
3. Do not make the ranking dependent on schools having to fill out yet another survey.

The vision of the Better World MBA Ranking is to help ensure future business leaders know how to integrate social and environmental factors into their thinking, whether it’s how to do full-cost accounting, build inclusive leadership and governance structures, or engage in ethical marketing. We aim to do this by:

1. Providing a complementary resource to prospective MBA students that helps them to identify which schools are on the cutting edge of making the world a better place.
2. Providing a carrot of positive recognition to leading MBAs (Top 40) and a stick of reprimand to those that are lagging.

In terms of ranking methodology, we focus on the three most important metrics we can obtain in the public domain: # of MBA core courses, # of research centres and institutes at the business school, and volume of faculty research on better world topics.

In order for a MBA programme to achieve top marks, it has to do three things:

1. Have at least five research centres dedicated to better world topics such as sustainable finance or clean energy or gender diversity (please see Better World Taxonomy here for full list of eligible themes).
2. Have five core courses that meaningfully integrate social and environmental into the course materials and instruction, as determined by headline prominence of such themes in the course title or short description.
3. Be publishing at least one professional research paper per faculty every three years that is cited by at least 10 other sources, according to Google Scholar.

The thinking is that any school fulfilling the above criteria is likely to be offering interested students meaningful exposure to learn how to integrate social and environmental factors into their management function via the core MBA courses, faculty expertise and research centres.

The target of five courses, five research centres, and one well cited professional research paper per faculty every three years reflects current best practices, and accommodates a variety of business school structures and sizes.

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