The cohort or point at which the employment measure is taken make differ.

The cohort or point at which the employment measure is taken make differ.

I don't think your comparison of these schools is useful. Bocconi is a Ferrari and Cranfield is a Mondeo. These are not bad choices for the people who select them.

Bocconi is Italy's only world-class university for business and economics, with around 14,000 fulltime students. Cranfield is a small graduate university for aerospace and environmental engineering, management and defence. It's not a huge domestic draw for finance students because it's not our top business school, or even in the top five: its business school has hundreds of full-time students, not tens of thousands. Any university without an undergraduate programme has less visibility, but if you expect these two schools to complete for alumni networks in investment banking then you will be disappointed.

Similarly, most people who work in finance don't work for investment banks. That's not the right measure for a MIF. EY is the biggest employer of Bocconi alumni. If you think that someone in a finance role at EY, the non-IB parts of HSBC or PwC is a failure, then you misunderstand the wide range of career goals for MiF students. Similarly, what is a good firm? Is it a company your friends at Bocconi know?

Cranfield and Bocconi simply don't complete. Who takes the MiF at Bocconi? Italians, 3/4rds of them. Internationally it is not even completing with excellent schools like ESCP, ESSEC and HSG because.... Italians. Cranfield is for international students who want to work in the UK. They do not limit themselves to IB roles. Indeed, they often start on lower salaries but, to be honest, in Italy there would be no finance jobs for them because of language barriers and racism and because most of them would not be accepted by Bocconi. They would attend Siena, LUISS or Tor Vergata, and get nothing relevant.

You have seen the salary data: Cranfield finance alumni have similar outcomes to comparable UK schools: http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/masters-in-finance-pre-experience-2018 If you separated out the data for non-Italian speakers at Bocconi, I think the numbers would surprise you. For salary increase, Cranfield is similar to Imperial and ESADE. For career progress, it's similar to Nottingham and Edinburgh. For aims achieved, it's above UCD and Warwick. It's competitors are the UK schools for very good (but not excellent) candidates, the people who go to Cass, Edinburgh, Lancaster and Henley.

And Cranfield, like most mid-tier British schools, had a shitty year when every decision was put on hold. Now Brexit is agreed by parliament, things are opening up and hiring is improving. So, it's a better time than last year to come to the UK.

Similarly, Nova is a great school to find work in Portugal, and HEC in Switzerland. The idea that you are unsure if these are good schools because they are not known by your friends from Bocconi is just bizzare. Is the ETH not one of the world great universities, even though few people know it? Is the Sorbonne really better than Cass because more people have heard of it?

Thinking this way does not help you to make choices. Writing so dismissively of strong schools shows unrealistic expectations and helps convince other people, evaluating second tier schools, that there are no opportunities for them.

It's a tiny school, and scholars work in tiny communities. In my field, for example, I can't name a researcher I follow at Harvard or Penn, so why should be able to name someone at a tiny school like Cranfield, Dartmouth or Yale? Indeed, in the UK the vast majority of research is in the Russell Group, which excludes Cranfield and most of the schools I name as its peers.

Overall, Cranfield is in the top quartile for research, on a par with Birmingham, Nottingham, Reading and Strathclyde https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/Attachments/2014/12/17/k/a/s/over-14-01.pdf . There are high-impact researchers and scholars there, including David Denyer (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=UOwFvyMAAAAJ), Eassam Shehab (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=mR9VYwgAAAAJ) and Howard Lightfoot (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=RGlQ93UAAAAJ).

But, to be honest, unless you are aiming at the PhD research doesn't matter. Almost all these schools work with the core curriculum set by the AACSB, and the one by the CFA. They will almost never go off-piste into leading-edge research discussions.

Do those Big 4 people you speak to recruit MiFs? Because in almost years Cranfield dramatically outperforms Bath. In the most recent FT ranking, for example: $78k alumni salary versus $48, and 100% employment versus 81%. http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/masters-in-finance-pre-experience-2018 I am sure your professors are unaware of those outcomes, as professors assess schools by their general brand power and research impact in their niche. If you showed them the FT salary data for the last ten years, they might have a different view.

Would you like a tin foil hat?