Ranking business schools
The numbers game
Oct 10th 2002
From The Economist print edition
Business schools hate rankings. Understandably
THURSDAY October 10th was a bad evening for business-school deans and their staff. After The Economist had gone to press, Business Week unveiled its biennial rankings in an online countdown, prolonging the agony for 30 American and ten non-American elite schools. Those that rise in the ranks will gain more eager applicants. Schools that fall will face recriminations from alumni and trustees alike.
These are the most widely watched of all business-school rankings. But there are plenty more. For the past 14 years, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has published a guide to MBA courses around the world. On October 11th, for the first time, it added a single global ranking, giving top place to Kellogg, Northwestern University's business school, which also topped the first Business Week rankings in 1988. U.S. News & World Report first produced a survey 12 years ago, gleefully remembered by its rivals for including Princeton in the list. (Princeton has no business school.) The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times (the latter owned by Pearson, part-owners of The Economist) each have their own rankings. Here is The Economist's own, brand new, poll of these polls, including Business Week's latest results (see table).
To ensure variety, each set of rankings measures and weights different things. The EIU claims the greatest focus on the student market, ranking schools by how they respond to what students say they most want from an MBA course. The Financial Times gives much weight to the level and percentage increase in a student's salary after an MBA course. It also weights a school's academic research, which is hard on those with no doctoral programme. The Wall Street Journal concentrates exclusively on the views of corporate recruiters. Controversially, the schools choose which recruiters should be consulted. Business Week gives much weight to student opinions—even though few students have experienced more than one business school.
Unless they are on top, business schools grumble discreetly about these rankings. Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth College's Tuck business school, bemoans the huge amount of staff time involved in replying to pollsters' questions. He oversees the whole process himself. As a few schools tend to be closely clustered at the top of the league, misinterpreting a question can easily cost crucial places on the ladder. But he concedes that rankings also encourage schools to innovate and to pay more attention to what students want.
Other academics grouse more noisily. Yale has a small business school. Ivo Welch, who teaches there, argues that ranking schools by the number of students gives roughly the same result as more elaborate surveys: Harvard top, Wharton second, Kellogg third and so on. The reason, he says, is that most surveys give heavy weight to the views of corporate recruiters. Inevitably, a disproportionate number of recruiters are alumni from large schools. And generally, alumni tend to favour their alma mater.
“The very idea of reducing learning to a single number is suspect,” says Henry Mintzberg of McGill University in Canada. “The rankings don't look at whether students are better managers as a result of their course.” Some schools distort what they do to raise their score. Yet rankings also make them attend more to their users. When John Byrne devised Business Week's ratings, “no one thought they had customers that they had to be responsible to.” Ranking other academic courses might make universities more aware that students and future employers are a market to compete for, not to ignore.