MBA College Ranking Guide

MBA college rankings guides attempt to measure the caliber of individual business schools by comparing them to each other based on any number of factors. Some sets of rankings, like U.S. News & World Report, are designed to measure the overall quality of these programs, while others, like ComputerWorld's Top 25 Techno MBAs, have a more narrow focus, comparing schools with regard to something specific—in this case, the relative sophistication of the technology they employ. Rankings almost always take the form of numerically ordered lists in which the "best" school is designated as #1, the second best, #2, and so on.

While it's certainly true that the reputation of a top-ranked school will likely impress your prospective employers, your career prospects won't necessarily be much affected if you don't attend a highly ranked school. As the website MyMBACareer.com notes, MBA college ranking is "a tool to help you gauge a school's quality and reputation, but only you can make the final decision about whether a school meets your career goals." This is true because:

• High rankings don't necessarily translate into higher quality education. Rankings tend to emphasize statistics, and it's hard to quantify subjective experience.
   
• Regardless of their rankings, many business schools have strong ties to important local and regional industries - ties that often translate into employment opportunities for graduates of these schools.
   
• Talented, ambitious people tend to do well regardless of where they attend business school.

Many different organizations provide business school ranking information, such as U.S. News & World Report, Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the Financial Times.

U.S. News & World Report

Each year, U.S. News & World Report ranks full-time and part-time graduate business programs accredited by the AACSB International. According to their web site, full-time programs are ranked according to the following criteria:

• Program quality assessment by peer academics. Weight = 0.25
• Program quality assessment by recruiters. Weight = 0.15
• Mean starting salary and bonus. Weight = 0.14
• At-graduation job placement rate. Weight = 0.07
• Job placement rate three months after graduation. Weight = 0.14
• Mean GMAT of new entrants to full-time program. Weight = 0.1625
• Mean undergraduate GPA of new entrants to full-time program. Weight = 0.075
• The proportion of applicants for admission to the full-time program who were rejected. Weight = 0.0125

Part-time programs are ranked "solely on the basis of nomination by business school deans and MBA program directors. Schools that receive seven or more nominations are ranked, listed in order of the number of nominations received."

Business Week

Business Week publishes rankings for full-time, part-time, and executive MBA programs every two years. (Updates to ranked schools' profiles are published yearly.) Business Week's rankings are based on a combination of student and corporate recruiter surveys (each weighted at 45 percent), and an "intellectual capital component," which measures "school's influence and prominence in the realm of ideas" (weighted at 10 percent).

Wall Street Journal

Each year, the Wall Street Journal ranks business schools that are accredited by the International Association for Management Education, as well as any foreign schools that are recommended by its panel of "business-school deans, business-school associations, recruiters and career-services directors." The rankings are based solely on the opinions of MBA recruiters, who are asked to rate schools on a ten-point scale for each of 27 criteria having to do with the quality of each school and its graduates.

Forbes

According to their web site, Forbes ranks MBA programs according to their average return on investment "by comparing the cost of attaining an MBA—foregone income and tuition—to the prospect of a bigger salary." Alumni from each of the schools provide pre- and post-MBA salary information that Forbes uses to make these calculations.

Financial Times

Every two years, the Financial Times ranks MBA programs based on over 20 factors, the most heavily weighted of which, at 20 percent each, are the current salaries of each school's graduates and the percentage of salary increase "from the beginning of the MBA to three years after graduation." The remaining factors, each weighted at 1-10 percent, include things like the percentage of women students and faculty, the percentage of international students and faculty, the number of faculty with doctoral degrees, and alumni recommendations.

This varies from guide to guide, but in every case, the three most basic elements of the process of determining rankings are the development of survey criteria, data collection, and data analysis.

• Development of criteria: A team of professors, school administrators, and other education experts usually develops the surveys used by rankings guides.
   
• Data collection: Data is most often collected through the survey of some combination of students, school administrators, corporate recruiters and executives. The information solicited ranges from the purely factual (e.g. "Provide the number of students who applied, were admitted, and enrolled as degree-seeking transfer students in Fall 2001") to the highly subjective (e.g. "On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate the relative responsiveness of the faculty to student concerns?").
   
• Data analysis: Once the data has been collected, complex formulas are applied in order to determine a school's overall score. These formulas allow for different factors to carry more or less significance - for example, the average GMAT scores of a school's incoming class may account for three percent of the total score, while the responsiveness of faculty to student concerns may account for five percent.

• Most rankings guides include only a select group of schools, rather than ranking all schools, and it's not always clear how this initial group of schools has been selected.
   
• Many rankings surveys ask deans, corporate recruiters, executives, and students to make lists of what they consider to be the top schools - and it's not clear what information these people are using to formulate their rankings.
   
• In order to formulate their scores, rankings guides must assign different levels of importance to different factors - and it's virtually impossible for anyone to determine how important a certain piece of information will be for a specific student.
   
• Putting schools into numerical order can exaggerate minor (or non-existent) differences in quality between programs.
   
• Many rankings guides are too general to be useful. This is especially true of guides that give a single score to each business school as a whole, instead of rating the relative merits of its specific programs.

Rankings (and their associated data tables) are a great source of basic information. For example, you can use them to quickly identify the most prominent schools, to get a feel for the caliber of a program you might be able to get into based on your test scores and academic record, or to find out which firms are hiring a school's graduates.

To learn more about how to evaluate business schools, read the Choosing a Business School section of our Q&A.