UCT business school jumps to second in the world, and its graduates' jobs are why

The University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business has risen five places to second in the world in the 2026 Corporate Knights Better World MBA Ranking, holding its place as the top MBA programme in Africa.

The ranking assessed 166 MBA programmes worldwide. Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics took first place, and Australia’s Griffith Business School, which had held the top spot for six consecutive years, was overtaken. As Sunday World reported on 6 November, the result also points to a wider shift in business education towards preparing graduates for social and environmental problems alongside conventional business demands.

The measurement changed in a way that matters to a school like UCT’s. Corporate Knights doubled the weighting given to alumni impact, from 10% to 20%. That measure counts graduates working in sustainability-related roles, or in organisations with a social or environmental mission.

UCT GSB director Dr Catherine Duggan said 62% of the graduate cohort covered by the school’s submission to the ranking worked in roles or organisations that met that definition, against an average of about 25% among the other schools in the ranking’s top 40.

“This change is a positive one, it recognises that a business school should not only be judged by what happens in its classrooms, but by what its graduates go on to contribute to business and society,” she said.

For a South African reader, the number behind that gap is the one worth watching. A business school’s placement record is usually read as a private return on a fees bill. Here it is being read as a public one, and the ranking now pays schools for sending managers into work that has a social or environmental purpose.

Duggan said the school has spent five years redesigning its MBA around applied learning, sustainability, responsible leadership and technological change. Sustainability now runs through core subjects including strategy, economics and accounting. The school reports that 83% of its core courses address impact and sustainability issues, against an average of 49% among the top 40 programmes in the Corporate Knights ranking. Teaching on responsible leadership is supported by the Allan Gray Centre for Values-Based Leadership, and the school has added courses on managing culturally diverse teams, navigating digital disruption and data-driven decision-making.

Artificial intelligence has become part of that redesign. Students are expected to weigh both the opportunities and the risks of the technology, including bias, inaccurate outputs, data privacy and accountability. In the Strategic Accounting for Business Leaders course, students use AI to run a financial analysis and then examine and critique what it produced.

“We treat AI as a managerial capability, not just a technology,” Duggan said. “For a leader, speed is only one consideration: we also need to ask whether AI improves the decision, what risks it introduces and who remains accountable for the outcome.”

She said the aim is to produce leaders who can use the tools with confidence while questioning the data and assumptions behind them. “Our goal is to develop leaders who can use AI with confidence and imagination while asking hard questions about the data and perspectives on which these tools are trained, how well they reflect African contexts, who benefits from their adoption, and how technology can contribute to inclusive growth,” she said.

On what graduates do afterwards, Duggan said they have founded companies that created thousands of jobs, led corporations introducing new services and technologies, embedded sustainable practices into business operations, and worked in government and in organisations focused on improving people’s lives.

She said the curriculum redesign was informed by consultations with alumni, employers, executives and prospective students. “One thing I have taken from our experience is the importance of listening to the people we serve and acting on what we learn,” she said.

The ranking is one measure among several, and it rewards a particular kind of graduate outcome. What it records this year is that a Cape Town business school is placing a far larger share of its graduates into socially and environmentally directed work than its global peers in the top 40, and that the world’s ranking of MBA programmes has moved to count that.