Corporate Knights Updates Sustainability-Themed "Better World MBA" Ranking for 2015

The Toronto, Canada-based Corporate Knights magazine has updated its sustainability-themed "Better World MBA Ranking" for 2015.

The Toronto, Canada-based York University Schulich School of Business once again leads the ranking, while the Montréal, Canada-based McGill University takes second. 

Copenhagen Business School takes position number three, while South Korea's KAIST takes the fourth position and the University of Calgary's Haskayne School of Business rounds out the top five. See the list of the top 20 schools and their changes from last year's ranking below.

A reshuffling

As is evident from the top list of schools, this year's ranking has been substantially shuffled from last year. Ostensibly, this is due to methodology tweaks. Last year, the magazine only ranked business schools listed in the Global MBA Ranking from the Financial Times; while this year it also ranks schools which were specifically invited by the publication "due to their track record in business sustainability education."

This shift has had substantial implications for the ranking: Copenhagen was not ranked last year (due to its absence from the Financial Times ranking,) but this year has broken into the top-three. Likewise, other schools, like the Canada-based Dalhousie University Rowe School of Business (ranked 31 in the Corporate Knights ranking but unranked by the FT) made the list.

However, there are notable absences, and, since there's a lack of transparency about which business schools were invited to participate and which were not, it's not clear why this is. For instance, was the University of Vermont's Grossman School of Business, which offers a specialized MBA in Sustainable Entrepreneurship and whose faculty publishes relevant research, not invited to participate, or did the school simply not make the cut?

The current methodology is based on three factors: the number of relevant research centers a business school has, the number of courses that integrate social and environmental topics and number of faculty publications, as well as the strength and number of relevant faculty publications.

Here's a list of the top 20 schools current ranked in Corporate Knights' Better World MBA Ranking, as well as their change from last year.