The W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University celebrates another new accolade this week. One of the most prominent sets of global university rankings puts ASU at No. 18 worldwide for Economics/Business. This is the fourth year in a row the W. P. Carey School has been Top 25 on the prestigious list from the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

“This particular ranking is extremely significant on a worldwide scale and confirms our international reputation,” says W. P. Carey School of Business Dean Robert Mittelstaedt. “The list is widely recognized globally, and we continue to climb up, thanks largely to our stellar faculty and its global impact on business education.”

The W. P. Carey School went up three places on the list this year. It’s the 10th edition of the rankings, also known as the “Academic Rankings of World Universities.” In 2005, an article in The Economist called the list “the most widely used annual ranking of the world’s research universities.” A piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education called it “the most influential international ranking.”

More than 1,000 universities are ranked in the study each year, but only 500 are actually published. The rankings look at six factors, including the number of highly cited researchers, the number of staff and alumni with Nobel Prizes and Field Medals, and other objective indicators and third-party data.

The W. P. Carey School is especially well-regarded in China because it has a top executive MBA program in Shanghai. Senior-level executives and government officials who have graduated from the program include three vice governors of China’s major provinces, six vice mayors of Shanghai, the chief executive officer of the Shanghai Stock Exchange (the fifth-largest stock exchange in the world), several bank chairmen, the chairman of Shanghai Airlines, the chief executive officer of Baosteel and the deputy commissioner of the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Britain’s Financial Times ranks the Shanghai program among the Top 20 executive MBA programs in the world.

Other recent high rankings for the W. P. Carey School of Business include Top 30 rankings from U.S. News & World Report for the undergraduate business, full-time MBA and evening MBA programs. The publication also places the school’s online MBA program on its “Honor Roll” of just 14 online graduate business programs. The Wall Street Journal ranks the school’s executive MBA program in Arizona No. 13 in the world.