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ESCP Business School has topped the 2026 FT ranking of masters in finance courses for pre-experience students at a time of strong demand for financial training, despite disruption in the graduate job market and the rise of rival qualifications.
The business school — founded in Paris and with campuses across Europe — heads the MiF table for the fourth successive year, followed by Skema in Lille, Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing, and French schools Essec and Edhec.
The top ranking tier of eight schools is completed by Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance at SJTU, HEC Paris, and Nova School of Business and Economics in Portugal.
A survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council found that global demand in 2025 for Masters in Finance programmes was up 14 per cent on 2024, while administrators say they are adapting their curricula to focus on “soft” skills, artificial intelligence and emerging topics, including private markets.
More in the Financial Training ranking report
Leon Laulusa, ESCP’s executive president and dean, says: “We prepare students very well for corporate finance, with an emphasis on leadership.”
Laulusa stresses the school’s focus on “hard, soft, ethical and ‘mad’ skills” — those focused on their personal strengths and passions. He points to its partnerships and marketing that draw in high quality international applicants, and a powerful network of alumni to advise on content and recruitment.
ESCP performed well in multiple categories, including alumni career progress, alumni network and careers service, and its alumni had the fourth highest average salary at $183,214 — a rise of 55 per cent in the three years since completing their programme.
The FT ranking of 70 pre-experience finance masters programmes is based on data provided by schools and their alumni three years after completing their programmes. The ranking measures include salary, career progression, international mobility, careers services, diversity and ESG-related teaching.
Nearly two-thirds of the ranked schools reported that at least 90 per cent of their graduates had found jobs within three months of completing their courses. But some showed lower recruitment success, including two-thirds for those at Trinity College Dublin, Trinity Business School and just over half at McGill University: Desautels, in Canada.
Uncertain prospects have led some students to explore other options, such as direct recruitment after undergraduate degrees, or part-time study, ranging from online courses to alternative professional qualifications.
Skema, ranked second overall, performed strongly for international course experience and environmental, social and governance teaching. The school was also one of the few institutions in the ranking to report gender parity among students.
However, the average percentage of female students on MiF courses was 34 per cent, with most cohorts heavily skewed to male participants. Similarly, there is a significant salary gap between male and female alumni, with women earning 13 per cent less on average than their male counterparts, just four percentage points lower than it was in 2017.
Bayes Business School in London made the most progress in the ranking, climbing 13 places to 16th. The school’s alumni have the highest average salary increase between course completion and today, at 98 per cent.
Texas A&M University: Mays Business School is this year’s highest new entrant, in 65th place. The US school is in the top 10 for career services, and its MiF alumni earn $121,625 on average.
The FT ranking assesses business schools’ approach to sustainability through their campus commitments to net zero emissions and publication of carbon emissions audits. SDA Bocconi/Università Bocconi in Italy performed best, followed by IE Business School in Spain and BI Norwegian.
Among the 10 locations around the world where most alumni work after completing their master’s degrees, only at assessed US schools do female graduates earn more than their male counterparts. In Switzerland and France, there is almost salary parity between genders.
Masters in Finance programmes have internationally diverse student cohorts with a wide range of citizenships.
Schools on average report that 58 per cent of students from schools that participated in the ranking process are from other countries and the share is highest in the UK, where 88 per cent are from abroad.
HEC Paris, ranked seventh overall, is top again for international work mobility, measured by alumni citizenship and the countries where students were based before their masters, on completion of the course and three years after finishing it.
Business schools’ participation in the Masters in Finance ranking is voluntary and institutions must be recognised by one of the two leading international accreditation agencies — AACSB or EFMD’s Equis — and have sufficient surveys completed by alumni to reach statistical significance.