Poets&Quants calculates its scores based on a weighted average of rankings from five major sources: U.S. News & World Report, The Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, LinkedIn, and The Princeton Review. These rankings take into account factors such as long-term career outcomes, student experience, admission statistics, starting compensation for graduates, campus environment, and professor quality.

STEM-Designated Fordham MBA Program Offers Tech Skills

The full-time MBA program is STEM-designated, helping students to develop the technical and analytical skills they’ll need to succeed in an increasingly tech-dominated economy. The program features a “Gabelli Launch Month,” a month-long pre-semester initiative where incoming students participate in workshops, networking events, and projects designed to prepare them for the academic and professional challenges ahead.

“Over the past year, we’ve focused on enhancing key aspects of the program, such as experiential learning opportunities, career outcomes, and global exposure,” said Alex Markle, the full-time MBA program’s director. “I’m proud of this momentum and excited to see how we continue to build on this success.”

Both Gabelli School MBA programs offer a Jesuit business education in the heart of New York City. Admissions are selective, with the full-time MBA enrolling approximately 60 students each year, and the EMBA enrolling cohorts of approximately 30. This small cohort size allows for more personalized attention and a closer-knit student community, faculty said. 

A Focus on Values

Francis Petit, the EMBA program’s director, says the program’s success is a product of Fordham’s Jesuit values. 

“Our goal has always been, as the Jesuit EMBA Program of New York, to offer a cura personalis approach to our students that is unique, personalized, and transformative,” said Petit. “We are very proud of our dynamic EMBA students and alumni, along with our committed faculty and staff.”

Now that the celebratory dust surrounding commencement is finally settling, the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) deserves a shout-out for some impressive recognition it received recently.

Each year Fordham’s Executive MBA program is recognized by Poets and Quants magazine, as the program climbs its way up the magazine’s ranking of rankings list.

“It’s based on performance on other rankings so it’s very interdependent,” explained Francis Petit, Ph.D., associate dean of executive programs. “So if you keep doing well on other rankings, like Financial Times or Bloomberg, it’ll have positive effect.”

Poets & Quants ranked the program 39th worldwide, up from 41 in 2013, and 42 in 2012. Petit cited the program’s international emersion elective as key to its success.

In addition, CEO Magazine ranked Fordham’s EMBA as a tier one program.

Another big win for GBA came directly from one of its students. MBA student Michael Hartigan took first place in this year’s All-America Student Analyst Competition sponsored by Institutional Investor magazine.

The competition brought together more than 2,100 students from over 81 universities, to trade $100,000 in virtual money. The four-month contest scored students in the same manner as any major investment house would to assess their own employees.

“Michael took a very solid approach from constructing a sound portfolio of three stocks that he felt were uncorrelated and took calculated risks,” said Robert Fuest, an adjunct professor at Fordham and the faculty advisor for students in the competition.

“He understands the difference between a good company versus a good stock; sometimes it could be a good company, but it’s a bad stock. And he gets that.”

In addition to Hartigan, seven other MBA students made it into the top 100 contenders, making Fordham the leading school in the competition.

“Part of what we’re doing is giving students practical experience and discussing business as it is in real life, not just theoretical,” said Fuest, who is also the COO of Landor and Fuest Capital.

“I think that taking a clinical aspect to learning is critical. They do it in law, they do it in medicine, and they do it in some business schools. This competition helps us to do that here.”

In Poets and Quants’ ranking of the top 50 EMBAs, Fordham tied with the University of Western Ontario in Canada and is just behind the University of California at Irvine at No. 26.

The Poets and Quants ranking measures the overall reputation of EMBA programs by combining equally weighted ratings from BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and U.S. News & World Report.

The new ranking also takes into account an array of additional data to assess the quality of the programs, from surveys of student satisfaction to increases in income attributed to the degree.

“We are, of course, always delighted and thankful to be positively recognized for our Executive MBA program and for our dynamic and spirited EMBA students and faculty,” said Francis Petit, Ed.D., associate dean for Executive MBA programs in the Graduate School of Business Administration.

“We also believe this recognition adds to the continued momentum of our program,” he said.

The Poets and Quants’ ranking maintains the high profile of Fordham’s EMBA program, which last year was ranked 25th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and was among the top 25 global MBA programs as ranked by CEO Magazine.

Launched in 2010 by John Byrne, the former editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com, Poets and Quants has received wide coverage by The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and BusinessWeek, and has reached 500,000 page views per month.