Business School Rankings

I am tired of visiting the BW forums and seeing people tirelessly arguing whether Harvard is the best or Stanford is the best. It is an everyday thing where people come up with some skewed methods of ranking the schools and then the posters worthlessly argue whether the analysis is right or not. It is good to weigh the ranking methodology to some extent - but once it crosses that limit, then it seems meaningless. Do I care whether Harvard, Wharton or Stanford is the best. No!! But it matters which schools are in the Top 20 and which schools are not - the rest is on my fit and my career goals. I don't even care if HBS is the best, if MIT can give me the podium which HBS cannot. Why do I care if UCLA has hot girls and Berkeley do not. Do I care Chicago, Columbia ranks over Michigan - nope, Michigan is a great fit for me - I would thrive in that community, CC I won't.

We should think in what way we as applicants are influencing the Business School Rankings. We are so obsessed with it that every journal and every newspaper is coming up with the idea of some "unique" methodology of Business School Ranking - it is a flourishing business right now. Since applicants are weighing the rankings to make the application decisions, schools are stressing more on going up the chain. Now, if the schools have to go up the chain, they are trying to push for higher average GMAT, GPA scores (with partial compromise of the quality of students) and getting trapped by the "numbers" game.

We should bring back the sanity to the rankings methodology. I think one of the best ways to do it is to ask the recruiters of the Fortune 500 company to rank the student quality based on their experiences in the last 3-5 years. We should disregard the "numbers" from the ranking methodology so that the schools don't get carried away with it. In a way it will encourage the schools to recruit more competent candidates ( I am sure most of the top schools are doing that) and create good reputation with the recruiters. Especially we should only have one business school ranking which should be the father of all (probably USNews or BusinessWeek) and instead of individual ranking it should have the tier method. Like Tier1 Top 20 schools , Tier2 Next Best 20 schools etc.

Also, remove this generic ranking and use specialized ranking instead - even then use the Tier Methods. But we can't do that unless we ourselves stop giving importance to the thousand rankings available in the market. Unless we stop arguing over some pithy ranking position, nothing is going to change. We have to change ourselves before we can ask them to change. We have to look inside ourselves before questioning anyone else.

Anyway here is a brief synopses how the rankings are evaluated:

US News & World Report
Each year, US News & World Report ranks full-time and part-time graduate business programs accredited by the AACSB International. According to their web site, full-time programs are ranked according to the following criteria:
Program quality assessment by peer academics. Weight = 0.25
Program quality assessment by recruiters. Weight = 0.15
Mean starting salary and bonus. Weight = 0.14
At-graduation job placement rate. Weight = 0.07
Job placement rate three months after graduation. Weight = 0.14
Mean GMAT of new entrants to full-time program. Weight = 0.1625
Mean undergraduate GPA of new entrants to full-time program. Weight = 0.075
The proportion of applicants for admission to the full-time program who were rejected. Weight = 0.0125
Part-time programs are ranked “solely on the basis of nomination by business school deans and MBA program directors. Schools that receive seven or more nominations are ranked, listed in order of the number of nominations received.”

Business Week
Business Week publishes rankings for full-time, part-time, and executive MBA programs every two years. (Updates to ranked schools' profiles are published yearly.) Business Week’s rankings are based on a combination of student and corporate recruiter surveys (each weighted at 45%), and an “intellectual capital component," which measures “school's influence and prominence in the realm of ideas” (weighted at 10%.)

Wall Street Journal
Each year, the Wall Street Journal ranks business schools that are accredited by the International Association for Management Education, as well as any foreign schools that are recommended by its panel of “business-school deans, business-school associations, recruiters and career-services directors.” The rankings are based solely on the opinions of MBA recruiters, who are asked to rate schools on a ten-point scale for each of 27 criteria having to do with the quality of each school and its graduates.

Forbes
According to their web site, Forbes ranks MBA programs according to their average return on investment “by comparing the cost of attaining an MBA--foregone income and tuition--to the prospect of a bigger salary.” Alumni from each of the schools provide pre- and post-MBA salary information that Forbes uses to make these calculations.

Financial Times
Every two years, the Financial Times ranks MBA programs based on over 20 factors, the most heavily weighted of which, at 20% each, are the current salaries of each school's graduates and the percentage of salary increase “from the beginning of the MBA to three years after graduation.” The remaining factors, each weighted at 1-10%, include things like the percentage of women students and faculty, the percentage of international students and faculty, the number of faculty with doctoral degrees, and alumni recommendations.

Some potential problems with rankings are:
- Most rankings guides include only a select group of schools, rather than ranking all schools, and it’s not always clear how this initial group of schools has been selected.
- Many rankings surveys ask deans, corporate recruiters, executives, and students to make lists of what they consider to be the top schools – and it’s not clear what information these people are using to formulate their rankings.
- In order to formulate their scores, rankings guides must assign different levels of importance to different factors – and it’s virtually impossible for anyone to determine how important a certain piece of information will be for a specific student.
- Putting schools into numerical order can exaggerate minor (or non-existent) differences in quality between programs.
- Many rankings guides are too general to be useful. This is especially true of guides that give a single score to each business school as a whole, instead of rating the relative merits of its specific programs.

and here is an excerpt from the businessweek archives of 1998:

"We're glad the rankings are taken so seriously. But this year, some people took them too seriously. After an investigation lasting several months, BW determined that some students at five schools tried to ''game'' the system by inflating their responses on the student portion of the BUSINESS WEEK survey. They urged their fellow classmates to answer the survey questions positively in hopes of moving up in the rankings. The five schools: Dartmouth, Duke, Purdue, the University of Texas at Austin, and Washington University.

There is no evidence that school administrations or faculty had anything to do with the students' attempts. The deans at four of those schools argue that if any discussion of the surveys did occur, it merely reflected the enthusiasm students feel about improvements at their schools. Says Ramesh K.S. Rao, director of the MBA program at Texas: ''I hate to see [our students'] uniformity and beliefs about the direction we're going penalize us.'' Purdue's dean, Dennis J. Weidenaar, says his own investigation uncovered no proof of any discussions or transgressions at all. "

This is what the rankings are leading to.. And it is our responsibility to stop this madness..