The MBA is the most popular graduate degree. It is sought after by thousands of students around the world. Therefore, it is not surprising that MBA programs are scrutinized to determine which ones are the best. One of the most anticipated rankings of MBA programs is that of Bloomberg Business Week, but other periodicals, including Forbes, US News and World Report, and The Wall Street Journal Post lists of MBA programs that show how some of the schools offering the degree rank against each other.
The published rankings have been achieved in various ways, often in different ways by the same publication from one issue to another. Rankings are obtained by surveying or interviewing deans of business schools, recruiters of company students who hire MBA graduates,
employers, graduates themselves, or combinations of these and other sources.
The first business school rankings focused on a dozen large well-known state and Ivy League universities whose reputations were already well established. They used to ignore hundreds of other reputable MBA programs. As time passed, the rankings expanded beyond the well-known programs to include twenty or more schools, and some rankings now include separate lists that rank the top fifty programs or the top hundred. Still, the focus is on a list of a dozen schools that are considered top-tier.
Not surprisingly, given the selection methods, most of the same group of schools appear in most rankings, although not necessarily in the same order. The lists virtually always include schools like Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, Pennsylvania Wharton, MIT, UC Berkeley, and other household names. It is also not surprising that these schools receive hundreds of applications from qualified students and have to reject about 90 percent of them. Interestingly, a study by Dr. Martin Schatz * showed that if schools are ranked simply by the GMAT scores of the incoming class of MBA students plus the starting salary of graduates, the list is very similar to the rankings achieved. for expensive surveys and interviews conducted by the magazines that publish rankings.
But what do the rankings really mean? Does it matter that Berkeley is No. 3 a year, No. 5 to the next and No. 2 a year later? Or that Stanford ranks second in Business Week but only fifth in another publication? The fact is, Wharton excels at finance, MIT excels at quantitative courses, and Harvard excels at using the case teaching method. Every school has strengths and weaknesses. Rather than looking for the best schools a prospective student can apply to, it may be better to look for rankings that focus on characteristics that are important to the applicant.
A ranking source looks at the top 40 MBA programs ranked according to individual characteristics such as students ‘GMAT scores, students’ GPAs, salary earned by graduates, program selectivity (number of rejected applicants) , the number of recruiters visiting the schools, and a ranking based on the weights assigned to the criteria most used by prospective students seeking MBA programs that fit them. The site explains that the ratings it provides on each individual criterion should be interpreted carefully and not taken at face value.
* Schatz, Martin, “What’s Wrong With MBA Ranking Surveys ?, Management Research News, 1993, pp. 15-18.
