When the Financial Times published its first global MBA rankings in 1999, Donald Jacobs, veteran dean of the Kellogg school at Northwestern University near Chicago, told the FT that he believed rankings were used by prospective students to help select programmes. But, he added with an air of scepticism: “Clearly the value is greatest among those people who have the least amount of information.”
View pdf: Ranking of the rankings
Over the years the number of business school rankings has proliferated, each providing more information to be digested by prospective students. These days, information overload is likely to be as much of a problem as lack of information.
One reason why rankings produce such different results is that there is no real consensus on how to measure the success of the product. With high schools, for example, published exam results give clear indicators about which schools are graduating the best-qualified individuals.
So while the SATs college entrance examinations in the US are viewed as a standard indicator, or the French Baccalaureate results from one school have comparable value to those from another school, one MBA degree is clearly not the same as another.
A whole range of data have been collected over the years to analyse how business schools perform: how companies rate the graduates from the school; how many job offers each graduate receives; what salaries the new graduates earn, and so on. Change the criteria, and the weightings on the individual criteria, and the rankings change too.
Broadly speaking, rankings fall into two categories: those that take a long-term view and value the career progress of graduates; and those that take a shorter-term view and focus on the student satisfaction on the programme and recruiter responses.
Both the Financial Times and Forbes fall into the first category.
■The FT annual rankings list 100 global business schools and are compiled from a survey of alumni who graduated three years previously, school data and an assessment of research. The three planks of the ranking are the career progress of alumni, the global focus of the programme and the generation of intellectual capital.
■The Forbes biennial ranking lists 50 US and 20 non-US business schools based on the return on investment for alumni five years after graduation.
Both BusinessWeek and the Economist survey students about their experience on the programme, while the Wall Street Journal surveys recruiters:
■BusinessWeek publishes its ranking every two years and surveys graduating students and recruiters, with 10 per cent of the final marks allocated to intellectual capital. Thirty US programmes and 10 non-US programmes are ranked. For the purpose of the European ranking (just five of the top 10 non-US schools are European), the three non-US second tier programmes are included, ranked jointly at number six.
■The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) publishes an annual ranking of 100 global business schools based on a survey of alumni and students and on data supplied by the schools. The ranking examines how the schools met the expectations of students.
■The Wall Street Journal annual ranking surveys MBA recruiters. The WSJ publishes three rankings: a National Ranking (US); a Regional Ranking (US); and an international ranking. In total 71 US schools and 15 non-US schools are ranked.
To try and come up with a rankings consensus, the FT has devised a combined table that brings together the ranks assigned by the five publications.
The combined ranking is produced using a methodology that would leave any self-respecting statistician quivering with fury but does give a real snapshot of those schools that perform well across all the publications.
The ranks are calculated by adding together the places achieved by each school that is placed in the top 10 and dividing by the number of rankings in which the school is cited.
Those schools that are cited in four rankings are placed higher than those cited in three, those cited in three are placed higher than those cited in two, and so on.
