The 2017 SportBusiness Postgraduate Course Rankings has been published aimed at providing the most reliable and respected rankings system for postgraduate sports management courses across the world.
Established schools continue to set the course with Ohio University has topped the overall list for the fifth time in the six-year history of the rankings and also rated highest on the alumni choice. The University of Massachusetts Amherst ranked top among the course leaders’ choice ahead of Ohio University and Deakin University in Australia. In Europe it was a return to the top for the CIES’s Fifa Master, which, like Ohio, recorded its fifth win in six years. You can view a full list of the Top 40 - Postgraduate Sports Business Courses here .
Experience, reputation and a focus on potentially lucrative areas of sport business appear to be determining factors in reaching the top of the SportBusiness Postgraduate Course Rankings.
T. Bettina Cornwell, a member of the PGR advisory board (a group of academics that SportBusiness consults annually to review and improve the rankings), remarks that “Due to the factors involved in producing high-quality educational experiences, one will typically find some stability in the top academic rankings and this is beginning to happen in the SportBusiness International ranking system,” says Cornwell, the Edwin E. and June Woldt Cone Professor of Marketing at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business.
6 of our academic partners are part of the Top 40
“The programmes clustering at the top of the list are either in business schools or have a strong tie to business. Graduates who go to work on the business side of sport, for example working with a brand in sport sponsorship, often have higher starting salaries than those working in sport organisations and this influences rankings.
The second characteristic that distinguishes those programmes clustered at the top of the list is their history; in the main, they are programmes that are more than 20 years old. They have attracted quality faculty and have a supportive and established alumni base, and this too influences rankings.
“2017 results show a strong performance by the generally well-recognised programmes by professors in the field,” says David Shilbury, director of Deakin Sport Network and co-director at the Centre for Sport Research at Deakin Business School.
View the top 15 European courses list here .
Click to view and download the full rankings supplement.
This article is part of a longer editorial published by our partner SportBusiness International.
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