There are few things that are more likely to raise the blood pressure of a business school dean than the testy subject of rankings. But few of them doubt that they are influential among students.
Over the past five years, as theglobal market for MBA students has flourished, so has the number of media organisations entering the rankings business.
While many business schools blatantly promote their ranking position in their marketing materials, others would rather see the publications disappear in a puff of smoke.
International business schools rankings
The love 'em and hate ' em relationship between academia and the press came to a head three years ago when the street wisdom ran that the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School were thumbing their noses at the media and pulling out of business school rankings.
However both schools supplied the Financial Times with the statistical data for this year's ranking.
The past year has seen further, more aggressive moves by the business schools to counter the ranking roller-coaster.
More specifically, the business school trade bodies, such as The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business in the US and the European Federation for Management Development, have begun to take a position on the subject.
In May last year EFMD began a series of meetings with European business school deans aimed at developing recommendations on how rankings should be conducted and what data schools should give to rankings organisations.
A statement on this is expected in the next few weeks.
EFMD has already written two lists of guidelines for media rankings, first in the late 1990s and more recently in 2001, though neither were widely circulated.
In September, the AACSB took an active position on media rankings for the first time. It issued a statement which was highly critical of rankings, including those published by the Financial Times, saying they could have "serious negative impacts on business education".
In its report the AACSB, which accredits 515 schools worldwide, said the ranking process was based on inconsistent data and subjective opinions.
John Fernandes, president and chief executive of the AACSB, concedes that many business school deans "do like the sport of it [rankings] ... You'll never see a dean who ranks well hiding the fact."
Nonetheless, he believes that rankings put pressure on business schools to change for short-term gain. "It's like the chief executive who goes for shareholder return."
Global MBA rankings
One example he cites is how some business schools cut their doctoralprogrammes, which are fiercely expensive to run, in order to plough money into the MBA programme, the subject of most rankings.
This in turn reduces the number of PhD graduates and therefore of new business school faculty. The cost of hiring faculty, as a result, rockets.
This means that all AACSB-accredited schools - including the 400 who will never qualify to appear in any media ranking - are affected, he says.
One of the most common complaints about business school rankings is that there is little uniformity between the results published in different newspapers and magazines.
How can the Kellogg school at Northwestern University come top in BusinessWeek but only rank 17 in the Financial Times, runs the argument.
The obvious answer is that different criteria give very different results. And the criteria used vary greatly:
* The EIU publishes an annual ranking of 100 global business schools based on a survey of alumni and students and data supplied by the school. The ranking examines how the schools met the expectations of their students.
* The Financial Times annual ranking lists 100 global business schools and is based on a survey of alumni who graduated from the school three years ago, data supplied by the schools and an assessment of research. The three main planks of the ranking are the careers of alumni, the international focus of the school and ideas generation.
* The WSJ annual ranking surveys MBA recruiters. The Journal publishes three tables: National Ranking (US), Regional Ranking (US) and International Ranking. In total, 66 US and 13 non-US schools are ranked.
* BusinessWeek publishes its ranking every two years and it is based on a survey of graduating students and recruiters, with the final 10 per cent of the marks allocated to the intellectual capital of the schools. Thirty US schools and 10 non-US schools are ranked.
* Forbes ranks 50 US schools and 15 non-US schools, based on the return on investment alumni have earned five years after graduation. Forbes divides the "foreign" business schools into those that run a two-year programme and those who run a one-year programme. For the purpose of the combined ranking, these two lists are combined.
To try to come up with a rankings consensus, the Financial Times has decided for the second time to publish a combined ranking based on the individual rankings published by BusinessWeek, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Financial Times, Forbes and Wall Street Journal.
The first combined ranking was published three years ago, in January 2003.
The combined ranking is produced by adding together the places achieved by each school and dividing by the number of publications in which the school is cited in the top 10.
Those schools that are cited in three rankings are placed higher than those cited in two, and so on.
Though clearly a statistically-indefensible way of producing any ranking, the result is three lists that are broadly indicative of the current state of play.
This is particularly true for the US and Europe, but many people may well find a global MBA ranking which does not include Harvard Business School difficult to swallow.
In 2003 many of these rankings were relatively new; the EIU published its first ranking in 2002, for example. But what has been interesting over the years is that there is a growing divergence between the schools listed in the rankings.
In 2003, for example, three schools, Kellogg, Chicago and Columbia appeared in the top 10 of all threeof the global rankings, from the EIU, Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.
In 2006, the best any school can manage is to appear in the top 10 of two global rankings.
The reason could be the change in methodology employed by the Wall Street Journal. Its 2005 rankings give three separate listings - in 2003 the WSJ produced a single ranking.
The international ranking favours many schools which are not included at the top of the FT or EIU rankings. Schools such as Ipade in Mexicoand Incae in Costa Rica, for example, were both ranked in the top 10 this year ahead of Harvard, Stanford and Columbia.
Alternatively, it could be that non-US schools are proving more competitive against their US peers.
