A very lively discussion on how valid the FT Rankings are - and, almost by proxy, how much European B-Schools have improved of late compared to American ones - is taking place at BW's forum:

http://forums.businessweek.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=bw-bschools&tid=85948

I'd like to know what people here think of all the heated argument going on there.

U.S. schools humbled in world rankings

The headline in yesterday's release of the QS World University Rankings was that Cambridge displaced Harvard as the best university in the world, at least by one measure.

This is apparently the first time in the history of the London-based Quacquarelli Symonds university rankings that someone other than Harvard has ranked first.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/09/_2_harvard_university_9918.html

QS World University Rankings 2010

1. University of Cambridge, UK
2. Harvard University, US
3. Yale University, US
4. UCL, UK
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US
6. University of Oxford, UK
7. Imperial College London, UK
8. University of Chicago, UK
9. California Institute of Technology (Caltech), US
10. Princeton University, US
11. Columbia University, US
12. University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), US
13. Stanford University, US
14. Duke University, US
15. University of Michigan, US

It looks more like a desperate attempt to stand out from other rankings and get tweets (No way in hell that UCL is better than MIT or Stanford. Sorry.)

Not only is an overall university ranking useless, it is irrelevant for people considering an MBA. CalTech, Princeton, and UCL don't offer MBAs.