You are here: Home / MBA Admissions / Ranking the MBA Rankings

Ranking the MBA Rankings

August 19, 2010 By

John Byrne, granddaddy of rankings, creator of the 1988 Businessweek ranking, which caused (to quote Ghostbusters) “Fire and Brimestone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!…dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria.”   Schools reacted to that ranking with significant change and improvement to curriculum, faculty training, student selection and corporate education.  Now Mr. Byrne has created a new ranking, www.poetsandquants.com, that not only takes into account other rankings, but he also ranks the rankings (and of course, Businessweek is on top).  

I have tremendous respect for John Byrne, but the choice is rarely between two schools. While he turned the tables on business school education and may do it again, I would like to see a ranking that takes into account consumer behavior.  In other words, if offered admission to multiple schools, what school does the consumer choose and why?  This information is not revealed in aggregated data currently reported by schools for rankings like yield, selectivity and number of total applications.  

I would like to see a ranking that answers the questions of how and why a candidate that is offered admission to 5 schools selects his/her school of choice. No ranking captures this data. They capture highest GMATs, satisfaction, best reputation, but they don’t capture the nuances of consumer behavior.  Over 20 years, I have been analyzing data of why my students chose my school and why some students I admitted chose another school. This data is not shared with the public, but all schools collect this data and across all schools the information would make for a great ranking.  

How about it, John?

For more information on using the rankings, please see The Rankings, an Accepted.com special report.

 By Natalie Grinblatt Epstein, former Admissions Dean/Director at 3 top business schools. Natalie would be happy to help you choose your top 5 schools.

 


Filed Under: MBA Admissions, Rankings Tagged With:
  • MBA

    Great point, Natalie! Often these statistics are good at giving us the "what's" and not so great at revealing the "why's". I have a feeling that most adcoms would like to keep this data under wraps, but it would be great to get a sense of the why's behind why people pick certain schools.

  • Tony

    I'm not clear on what a ranking of "what school would an applicant choose?" would prove. That would prove popularity of schools among applicants, but I'm not sure how valuable that is. Or, for that matter, how enlightening it is, since I think a search of any online community would yield this information (just look at the number of times each school is mentioned). Or, for that matter, just look at the number of applications that each school received each year.

    Even with these data, what would anyone do with it? It might help schools project their yields, but that's about it… If I'm an applicant, how does it help me to know that Harvard is the most popular school among applicants?

    While that sounds like a fun exercise, I'm not sure I "get" what it would add to the dialogue.

  • Natalie Grinblatt Epstein

    Dear MBA and Tony,

    Thank you for the comments. Tony, I believe as an applicant, it would be helpful to know why your peer group would choose Stanford, Wharton, Haas, Booth, Ross over HBS. Right now, the data does not give you this information and these choices do, in fact, happen.