The management education sector is increasingly obsessed with the ranking of business schools. Publishers such as the Financial Times, Business Week and the Wall Street Journal sponsor regular surveys that stoke interest to the point that their coverage produces some of their top selling editions.

"Rankings are here to stay,” says Kim Keating, Director of Public Relations at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. “They have become so popular that there are now six major publications ranking different attributes among business schools. I believe that they can provide insight to the many audiences looking at business schools... …prospective students, academics, recruiters, and executives interested in new research or in executive education programs. The important thing to remember is that each ranking is measuring something a little bit different from the others. Look at them all to understand what they are measuring, and then do the research about each school to see which will be the best program for you."

As editor of The MBA Career Guide, I take a slightly different view. We have been invited to produce “rankings” since 1995, but I have consistently declined the opportunity. My qualifications for the role are that, with the assistance of MBAs on our staff, we have been producing World MBA Tour/topmba.com MBA Recruiter Research for a number of years. The results are well respected and the recruiter feedback provides a credible, independent basis for ranking schools. As Helle Jensen from INSEAD says, “I like the methodology adopted by The MBA Career Guide’s Recruiter Research. It is a credible and sensible approach to evaluating business schools.” However, I have never been convinced of the benefit in producing a definitive ranking, preferring instead to publish our list of the top 20 schools in alphabetical order.

In my role as editor of the Guide I am exposed to the views of business school Deans some of whom see rankings as an ‘informational misrepresentation’. Eduardo Abascal, a Director of the MBA at IESE, Spain, believes that, ‘…rankings allow MBA applicants to stop thinking about which school would be best suited to their needs, but encourage a herd effect towards the top schools, creating a misfit between candidate expectations and school delivery.’ He also feels that the variation in teaching styles, course length, linguistic requirements and age profile of schools make even the “standard” full-time MBA programmes difficult to compare.

In Europe, the cultural impositions placed on a school by their country of location can make them very different from the standard two year, case-led, multi-functional MBA that has come to prominence in the USA. Bernard Ramanantsoa, Dean of the HEC School of Management argues that his school is one of the best in the world, but because of its French culture can never be ranked accordingly. HEC, like ESSEC and ESCP-EAP, are Paris-based Business Schools that receive funding from the Paris Chamber of Commerce, which places cultural constraints on the schools.

Each of these schools regularly attracts between 150-200 companies on-campus to their annual combined MBA and undergraduate recruitment fairs – comparable in numbers to the best US schools. Each school is highly coveted and reputable within France. But, HEC is obliged to teach part of its programme in French and maintain French business culture throughout
the programme. These factors rule out many of the best MBA students and a number of major MBA recruiting companies. Consequently HEC, ESCP-EAP and ESSEC never appear at the top of MBA rankings.

By contrast, INSEAD, also based near Paris, is private. It can teach what it likes. Its Dean, Gabriel Hawawini, describes the INSEAD vision to be: “…to create a global village – a community of exceptional international managers.” This profile allows for a much broader applicant pool and, at the MBA level, appeals to a longer list of recruiters. Consequently, INSEAD has always featured prominently in European rankings.

New markets are developing strong MBA programmes, further invalidating rankings which focus only on mature regions like the USA. For example, in the last five years, in Latin America, the number of GMAT test takers in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Argentina has doubled, and the conditions for entry into the top business schools in the region have become much stricter as schools target the best young professionals. It is now normal for schools to request five years of professional experience and for the average student age to be 29. The topmba.com Recruiter Research suggests that international recruiters are still not entirely familiar with Latin American MBA programs, which tend to be overshadowed by their US and European counterparts. However, schools such as IPADE and EGADE – Tec de Monterrey in Mexico, and Getulio Vargas in Brazil have begun to establish a profile amongst such companies.

The same is true in Asia-Pacific, which is the fastest growing region in the world, both in term sof MBA applicant and MBA recruiter numbers. In Australia, schools like Melbourne and AGSM have started to establish themselves as serious international business schools. At the same time, schools in Asia like National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and International University of Japan are also becoming more established.

What should would-be international business school candidates make of rankings produced by Financial Times, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal - or the research conducted by The MBA Career Guide?

First, do not rely on the final ranking to create your own order of preference for schools. Look at the numbers behind the rankings and decide if the criteria are important for you. If you compare the top schools in each survey, they are remarkably consistent. Schools move up and down from year to year, and from ranking to ranking, because there is no single, objective, ranking of the best MBAs.

Financial Times(20 January 2003)

Business Week(11 October 2002)

Wall Street Journal(9 September 2002)
Top 20 - World - Ranked Top 20 - USA - Ranked Top 20 - Overall - Ranked
1 Wharton - Pennsylvania Kellogg - Northwestern Tuck - Dartmouth
2 Harvard Chicago Michigan
3 Columbia Harvard Carnegie Mellon
4 Stanford Stanford Northwestern
5 Chicago Wharton - Pennsylvania Wharton - Pennsylvania
6 INSEAD MIT Sloan Chicago
7 London BS Columbia Texas at Austin
8 NYU Michigan Yale
9 Kellog Duke Harvard
10 MIT Sloan Dartmouth Columbia
11 Tuck - Dartmouth Cornell Purdue
12 Yale Virginia UNC (Kenan Flagler)
13 IMD California (Berkeley) Michigan
14 Virginia Yale Indiana
15 Duke NYU California (Berkeley)
16 California (Berkeley) UCLA Maryland
17 Georgetown USC (Marshall) Emory (Goizueta)
18 IESE UNC (Kenan Flagler) Ohio
19 Cornell Carnegie Mellon Cornell
20 UCLA Indiana Virginia
Financial Times(20 January 2003)

Business Week(11 October 2002)

Wall Street Journal (9 September 2002)
Top 10 - Non U.S. - Ranked Next Nine - Non U.S. - Ranked
1 INSEADIMD
2 Queens ITESM
3 IMD IPADE
4 LBS ESADE
5 Toronto (Rotman) INSEAD
6 Western (Ivey) Western (Ivey)
7 Rotterdam Instituto de Empresa
8 IESE London BS
9 HEC Toronto (Rotman)
10 York (Shulich)

The MBA Career Guide Listings are in Alphabetical order not Ranking.

The MBA Career Guide
(20 July 2003) The MBA Career Guide
(20 July 2003) The MBA Career Guide
(20 July 2003)
Top 10 - USA Top 10 – Europe Top 10 – Latin America Chicago

Cranfield
Cath. Uni. Chile
Columbia HEC MBA COPPEAD.
Harvard IESE EGADE (Mexico)
Hass - Berkeley IMD ESAN
Kellogg - Northwestern INSEAD Getulio Vargas (Brazil)
MIT Sloan Instituto de Empresa IAE
NYU London BS IESA
Stanford Manchester BS IPADE (Mexico)
Tuck - Dartmouth Rotterdam
ITAM
Wharton - Pennsylvania SDA Bocconi Uni. S?o Paolo
The MBA Career Guide
(20 July 2003)
Top 10 - Asia
AGSM (Australia)

CEIBS (China)
Chinese U. Hong Kong
HK Univ Science andTech.
IIM - Indian Institute
INSEAD (Singapore)
IUJ (Japan)
Macquarie (Australia)
Melbourne
National U. (Singapore)

The MBA Career Guide has been conducting research in which, consistently since 1996, Harvard, Wharton, INSEAD and London Business School respectively, have featured uppermost amongst US and European business schools. 2000 was the first year that surveys from the Financial Times and Business Week agreed with these results. The high degree of overlap between these findings suggests that these schools do share distinguishing characteristics and that there may well be an ‘elite’ amongst the world’s business schools.

But beyond these few top schools, there is a remarkable lack of consistency between the various rankings. What accounts for this lack of consistency? The answer is: the different methodologies employed by each ranking. Any informed attempt to make use of rankings must begin with a basic understanding of the methodologies employed. It is important to keep in mind for example, when using the Wall Street Journal rankings that they focus almost exclusively on how corporate recruiters perceive the experience of recruiting on-campus at any given school.

By contrast, the Business Week rankings believe that the quality of an MBA is measured by three criteria – student satisfaction, employer satisfaction and research output. A major weakness of the Business Week ranking is that it maintains a strong bias towards both US MBA recruiters and US Students (the proportion or European students questioned is rarely higher than 10%). Another is that it is obviously in a student’s interest to speak favorably of their school and watch it climb the rankings. Whilst studying for an MBA in America I saw the willingness of students and alumni to score their own business school as highly as possible because, ‘…the better the school does, the better our job prospects…’ In addition, the Business Week research evaluation is based entirely on articles published by faculty in US academic journals. As a consequence, it is unable to measure the comparable quality of research from non-US schools whose faculty invariably publish in non-US journals.

The Financial Times relies on more objective measures and contains no input from recruiters in their survey, but places a high weighting on “Weighted Salary three years after graduation”, followed by “Research Rating” and a rating of the “Number of Doctoral students” produced by the school. Compared with Business Week and the Wall Street Journal, the FT is more global in scope, in that it directly compares American and international MBA programmes. Limitations with the FT methodology revolve around the validity of directly comparing one and two year programmes. In addition, the heavy emphasis on salary three years after graduation’ can bias results in favor of schools with strong ties to the investment banking industry (which tends to pay the most at this stage of alumni careers).

The Wall Street Journal has been much the most controversial of the rankings, using criteria not adopted by others. In particular, it asks recruiters to focus on their recruiting experience and the profile of candidates they meet from a school, rather than the quality of the school itself. The different slant in the questions has produced remarkably differing results from say, Business Week. Tuck has featured as the top US business school in both the first two editions of the Wall Street Journal survey, with Carnegie-Mellon not far behind. Amongst European schools, ESADE, based in Barcelona has done very well, at the expense of better-known schools. Rather than calling into question the Wall Street Journal methodology, it simply goes to emphaise that rankings are entirely dependent on the types of questions set and, perhaps even the interpretation of the questions.

Finally, the World MBA Tour / topmba.com Recruiter Research published by The MBA Career Guide looks only at input from international MBA recruiters, who seek MBAs to work in more than one country. It does not attempt to rank the schools, listing instead, in alphabetical order, the top ten in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America. It then lists the next twenty-five “best” schools in the US and the next twenty-five “best” schools in Europe – also in alphabetical order. The methodology adopted by The MBA Career Guide is very simple and transparent. Since most MBA students choose to study to facilitate a career change, or to accelerate career progression, the career outcome is consequently the most important test.

The MBA Career Guide asks international recruiters to identify their preferred schools and then aggregates the results to identify which schools are most popular. This measure is remarkably stable because recruiters tend not to change their preferences dramatically year by year, but rather change school selection gradually, through trial and error. The MBA Career Guide produces results for Europe, Asia, Latin America and North America, but does not integrate these results across regions. Schools in each region are at different stages of development and, with the exception of the global consultancies and investment banks that recruit across regions, tend to serve completely different sets of recruiters.

As the MBA Director at Cranfield says: “The MBA Career Guide Research adds a great deal of value because it is a clear statement from the market place about the popularity of international MBA programmes with recruiters. It also gives us a clear indication of what we need to do to improve. Any improvements we make to enhance our visibility amongst recruiters will be of direct benefit to our students – another sign of useful research.”

In the end, the main problem with rankings is that they pretend to make objective something that is fundamentally a very personal and subjective thing. Users need to delve into each ranking and identify the elements that can provide useful information or insight into schools that may interest them.

Extracts from the World MBA Tour / topmba.com Recruiter Research are published within partner publications in over 20 countries around the world.

Nunzio Quacquarelli (Wharton MBA alumnus and editor of The MBA Career Guide), is the Managing Director and founder of topcareers.net and is an authority on the international business education market.

Useful Links
Additional information on business schools research also available at:
www.ft.com
www.businessweek.com
www.wsj.com
www.usnews.com
www.americaeconomia.com