This will be a year of reckoning for many business schools. After 12 months in which MBA admissions teams saw a rebound in applications, driven by people choosing full-time study to escape a difficult jobs market, comes the sobering reality of meeting new student needs in an age of uncertainty.

The movement in this year’s Global MBA ranking illustrates in part how well schools have coped with the turbulence of 2020.

For example, one trend among MBA applicants in 2020 was to choose courses close to home, given the travel restrictions imposed to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Being located in a large urban area with a big population can be an advantage in times of restricted travel, offering proximity for schools to a large pool of applicants. This is likely to be a factor in the slight shift up the ranking of institutions in global cities, such as London Business School and New York University’s Stern School of Business. (Another factor is that a small number of schools opted out of the ranking, citing concerns that the pandemic might distort results and that they and alumni were too focused on the pressures of Covid-19 to compile the data.)