Business School Ranking
Business schools nowadays are getting more competitive and for good reason. Getting a high business school ranking can significantly affect the number of applications to a business school. High business school ratings also boost a school's reputation among its peers. These are just some of the reasons why students hoping to get an MBA would want to obtain that degree from a top business school, and why most of them turn to business school ranking publications before they make their pick.
Two of the most popular publications that churn out their editions of a business school ranking are Business Week and US News & World Report. Other publications that also conduct business school ranking procedures include the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Financial Times.
Schools most often ranked the highest when it comes to offering MBA degrees are Harvard, Pennsylvania, Columbia, Chicago, Northwestern and Stanford. Despite their position at the top, schools like Harvard provide limited information to ranking publications, however. This is mainly due to the prevailing perception of Harvard administrators that information they may provide can easily be misused.
The Problem with MBA Rankings
Most academics firmly believe that the business school ranking system is facing a number of problems. For one, while most publications tend to list the best schools in no particular order when making college reviews, readers tend to look at the colleges according to how they are placed on the list. A business school ranking, especially when done by a popular national publication, also tends to become a self-fulfilling prophesy regardless of how biased and inaccurate the review was. For example, MBA school A was given a top business school ranking after a sloppy and rather biased review. This resulted to a lot of admissions to MBA school A. The number of admissions to a school in a given year is often taken into consideration when making an MBA school rank.
Other problems seen in the process of generating an MBA school rank include rankings that are conducted among a small number of schools offering MBA programs, leaving out other schools that may also have excellent MBA program offerings.
Furthermore, allegations of bias and deliberate padding of results to increase circulation sales are not helping the reputation of business school ranking publications among academics and school officials.