Spain’s top business school and two of its UK rivals lead the online MBA ranking for a third consecutive year, as the non-traditional courses push to increase their appeal to future leaders, while matching the rigour of their campus-based rivals.
Madrid-based IE Business School, where students reported the biggest salary bump, topped the Financial Times’ online MBA table for 2025 and also scored well for ESG and net zero teaching.
The school was the best ranked for international mobility, based on graduates’ citizenship and places of work from their pre-MBA time to three years after they finished their course. Alumni received an average salary of $209,202, a 45 per cent increase in the three years after they completed the course.
London’s Imperial College Business School retained its second place with alumni average salary rising by a third to $228,443. The school has the highest percentage of international faculty and followed IE in the international mobility ranking. Graduates praised the diversity of students at Imperial, which helped boost the management skills needed to become senior leaders.
Online MBA table 2025
Read the report and full ranking of 15 programmes
Warwick, in third place overall, kept its second position for career progress and improved the programme delivery from third to second this year.
Alumni of University of Southern California: Marshall, at number four, have the highest average salary at $228,500. The school comes second for research, which measures the volume of academic papers by full-time faculty, and third for career progress, based on alumni’s level of seniority and the size of the organisation they now work for, versus three years ago.
On the basis of value for money, the highest score goes to University of Bradford School of Management in the UK, which ranks 12th overall. This criterion takes into account alumni salaries, scholarships, fees and other costs as reported by graduates.
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Newcomer University of Porto – FEP | PBS, in eighth place, comes first for online interaction among students as well as the faculty’s availability. The Portuguese school came in third for ESG and net zero teaching.
Australia’s AGSM at UNSW Business School keeps its top position for the carbon footprint category. This metric considers a school’s net zero target year and the availability of a public carbon emissions audit since 2019, with extra credit for reports covering Scope 3 emissions.
Personal development was the highest motivation for doing an online MBA, closely followed by improving career opportunities and management development. Working overseas and starting a company were low priorities for most graduates.
Male alumni still earn higher salaries than their female counterparts, although the gender pay gap has decreased to 8 per cent this year, the lowest since 2020. This marks a significant improvement compared with 2024 when the gap was 25 per cent.
This change however may be partly due to a nearly $5,000 decrease in average male salaries this year, while the increase in women’s salaries has picked up in recent years.
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Students starting an online MBA tend to have a wider age range, between 20 and 50, than those on campus-based, full-time courses or part-time executive programmes, which are aimed at senior managers.
Those on executive MBAs tend to begin in their late 30s to early 40s, while full-time MBAs on campus attract those in their late 20s.
University of Florida: Warrington in the US came in seventh and is top for programme delivery, which is based on how graduates rate the delivery of live classes, other teaching materials and exams. The school is also top in the research category.
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When it comes to the curriculum, alumni rate corporate strategy as the most useful topic in their career, closely followed by general management and organisational behaviour. Graduates suggest that schools could enhance their teaching of law and fintech.
Nearly all alumni of online MBA programmes experienced an improvement in their job positions after completing their courses. The percentage of those in senior management roles increased by 20 points, while the proportion of graduates in professional positions decreased by about 25 points.
About 60 per cent of alumni work in the top five industries, with the largest share in technology. Consulting and financial sectors are less dominant, when compared with their presence among full-time campus-based MBA alumni. This suggests a broader distribution of career paths beyond traditional MBA industries.
Despite being a part-time degree, most online MBA alumni completed their course within two years. Three per cent of those surveyed completed the course within a year, while about 90 per cent finished within three.
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The ranking is based on surveys of schools and of alumni who completed their online MBA in 2021.
In some cases the response rate was too low for some of the 22 schools that took part to qualify for the final ranking.
