The Rankings Race
Why business schools are skeptical about the value of published rankings.
By David Wenger
Director of Communications, Marketing and Public Affairs
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Americans love ranking and competition. We rank sports teams, cars, restaurants, actors, musicians, how much money we make, how fat we are, even our most likely causes of death. We are told that rankings measure value and merit. But, as with many competitive venues (think pre-season football polls), there’s often more hype than substance, chance than merit, data than real information.
So how about business school rankings? The question of how seriously deans and school administrators should take rankings is a hot topic around the country. Some schools have chosen to drop out of the rankings race completely; others have made substantive program changes specifically targeted to increase rankings performance. As often as the question arises, we know that many McCombs alumni wonder what McCombs is doing about rankings.
SHOULD MCCOMBS ACTIVELY SEEK TO IMPROVE ITS RANKINGS?
If academics were more like sports, and quality were assessed merely by who had more points at the end of the day, then attempting to maximize ranking scores would be a no-brainer. But in the world of higher education, the “game” is more complex, and quality is not so simplistically defined.
Academic institutions are in the business of educating people for a lifetime, and it is difficult to put simple metrics around the rich and nuanced environment that makes for a top program. So far, none of the published rankings have successfully put numbers around such things as intellectual vigor, creative thought, ambition, innovative teaching, networking, interpersonal skills, successful job placement or any of the myriad other factors that go into an outstanding professional program.
Even so, while most understand these limitations intellectually, business IS a discipline of competition much more so than our academic colleagues in the arts and sciences. We understand market forces and brand perception, so shouldn’t we be maximizing our rankings for the best interest of the school?
THE “SAUSAGE MAKING” OF RANKINGS
Business schools, whose students are considered the best supply for future industry leadership and continually earn top-dollar jobs, are subjected to intense media attention. There are currently more than 30 external surveys that rank the academic programs in business schools, 15 of which attempt to rank order the schools. Six of these are recognized in business circles. In addition to the surveys in U.S. News and BusinessWeek (which publish both undergraduate and graduate program editions), there is the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the British publications, Financial Times and the Economist.
As one would expect in a competitive market, each of these surveys attempts to find its own niche (read: bias) through a unique methodology. The items singled out for rating include such things as selectivity of admissions, student satisfaction, program specifics, starting salaries, recruiter satisfaction, alumni connections, to name just a few. (McCombs employs a full-time market researcher, Matt Turner, Ph.D., whose primary responsibility is assembling the data for published ranking surveys.)
Yet despite the complexity of the information measured, these criteria still do not present a holistic picture of the total quality of the school.
Here’s one example. Faculty productivity and research is largely ignored by these publications. Three of the four well-known American business rankings, the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and Forbes, omit faculty productivity from their rankings altogether, while BusinessWeek and the Economist ascribe only minor weight to this factor (10 percent and 3 percent, respectively). Only Financial Times weights this seriously at 20 percent. And yet the caliber and productivity of faculty is a major component of the top research universities and an essential measure of a program’s academic rigor.
As a respondent to published rankings, a business school has no opportunity to correct such inconsistencies. We provide data that is requested, often wondering why a particular data slice has been chosen, but have no chance to step in and clarify the real points of distinction and value within our programs.
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