Last week, U.S. News published an informative interview with adcom members from Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. The following tips emerged:

• “Be true to yourself.” – Don’t say or write only what you think the adcom want to hear or read, and exude confidence and pride for your accomplishments and experiences.
• “Make a case as to why you think you fit that school.” – Expressing how you fit with Mendoza is important. Do thorough research so you’ll be able to present how you fit with the Mendoza program personally and academically.
• “We look for essays that are crisp and concise in both design and concept.” – Start with a creative lead and build your theme from there. And of course…no mistakes allowed!
• “The quality of work experience is more important than the quantity.” – Adcom measure qualitative work experience by looking at good career progression, effective leadership and teamwork experiences, and quantifiable initiatives led.
• “Your recommender needs to know you well.” – While choosing a big name recommender may seem like a good idea to you, it doesn’t make nearly as good an impression as when you choose a recommender who can truly provide a picture of you, both personally and professionally.
• “If you’re not interested, why should we be interested?” – Being prepared is key. You present yourself as a sloppy candidate if your application shows you did little or no research or if you come inappropriately dressed to an interview and without a pen, paper, and extra resumes (or if you don’t come on time or even early).

FYI, These tips are valid at almost every top MBA program.

Related Accepted.com Resources:

• B-School Zone: Mendoza College of Business
• 2010 Notre Dame MBA Admissions Q&A with Brian Lohr
• Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business Packages

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Accepted.com ~ Helping You Write Your Best

Don’t give them too much importance. Don’t replace research and self-reflection with school ranking to determine where you apply or attend. Using them mindlessly could contribute to an expensive, time-consuming mistake.

Blinding yourself to the rankings’ flaws leads to poor decisions. Consider this partial list of limitations:

1. They don’t measure exactly what’s important to you.
2. Overall rankings hide strengths (and weaknesses) in particular areas. Gem programs thrive outside “the top ten” or “top twenty.” Graduate students accomplish their goals and gain acceptance or have a better chance of obtaining financial aid when they recognize those gems.
3. Averages are exactly that. Average. They aren’t a cut-off and don’t reflect extenuating circumstances or the interplay between myriad factors in an admissions decision. Applicants are accepted with below average stats and are rejected with above average stats.
4. Surveys, especially surveys of students and alumni (BusinessWeek, Financial Times, The Economist) can be gamed. Students and alumni know that higher rankings increase the value of their degrees and have an incentive to think kindly of their schools.
5. Survey respondents are not always well informed. They don’t necessarily know about recent developments and new programs at the schools they are ranking. They are opining based on what they experienced years ago or “heard.”
6. For those rankings that survey recruiters (BusinessWeek), realize that recruiters may value factors that you couldn’t care less about (Good service for recruiters, excellent MBAs willing to work for low pay, comfortable interview rooms).
7. The raw rankings don’t reveal the degree of difference between the different schools. While there could be a real difference in international or even national opportunity in a program ranked 25^th as opposed to 5^th. There is probably little difference in overall opportunity for a program ranked 8^th as opposed to 13^th.
8. ROI measures may reflect geographic differences or differences in starting salaries in particular industries more than educational quality.

Rankings are surveys spiced with data and frequently mirror commonly held beliefs about institutions. Reputation and brand can play a role in your application and acceptance decisions. They should never be the primary reason you apply or accept an offer of admission. After you research a school’s strengths and weaknesses, educational approach, culture, admitted student profiles, and educational and professional opportunities, then you can consider brand.

So as you choose where to apply, mine the “rankings” that are not really rankings. Use the data to launch and supplement your qualitative and in-depth research about the schools. You will unearth the gems just right for you.

Business School Rankings and methodology

1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. Northwestern Kellogg
3. Wharton
5. MIT Sloan
5. Univ. of Chicago
7. UC Berkeley Haas
8. Dartmouth Tuck
9. Columbia
10. Yale

Law School Rankings and  Methodology
1. Yale
2. Harvard
2. Stanford
4. Columbia
5. NYU
6. UC Berkeley
6. Univ. of Chicago
8. Penn
9. Univ. of Michigan
10. Duke
10. Northwestern
10. University of Virginia

Medical School Rankings (Research) and Methodology
1. Harvard
2. Johns Hopkins
3. Penn
3. Washington U (St. Louis)
5. UCSF
6. Duke
6. Stanford
6. Univ. of Washington
6. Yale
10. Columbia

A few caveats: My strong recommendation is to use the rankings as a library of raw data conveniently compiled in one location and not as a tried and true guide of educational quality. They are not the latter. They are the former. To the extent you are going to use the rankings as a guide to school reputation and brand value, you must understand the methodology behind them and what they are measuring. Be cognizant of the differences between what is important to you and what is important to the rankings.

A few observations on the rankings themselves:

1. There are many ties in the rankings, which implies that the differences in reputation are almost imperceptible when talking about closely ranked programs. For example the difference between being “in the top ten” and out of the top ten (i.e. #11) for medical (research) programs is 1 point, for the top law and business schools it’s  2 points. Don’t get hung up on these differences.
2. The “top ten” changes little from year to year. In most cases, if you compare these rankings to the 2009 version, it looks as if US News just reshuffled the deck a tiny bit.

For more on rankings, please see:

• The Rankings (Part 1 of 5) A multi-part series that just concluded.
• Rankings: Controversy and MagazineSales
• Law School Admissions: Study Says Rankings Influence DecisionMakers

First for that initial research: Let’s say you are looking into the schools you will apply to. You recognize that your academic qualifications are an important element in that decision so you want to know average test scores and GPA for the different schools. That data is conveniently found in US News rankings . For MBA’s, you can also find it at BusinessWeek and the Financial Times.

US News’ rankings also allows you to rank or select programs by a limited set of criteria. For example, you can filter medical schools, business schools, and law schools by specialty, tuition, or class size.

MBA’s have more options.  If you are concerned about return on investment, then the new BW ROI rankings are enlightening as well as The Financial Times’ and Forbes’. If you want to know what students thought of their MBA experience, turn to BW and The Economist/Which MBA. Perhaps you seek a ranking of European programs because you intend to study in Europe; The Financial Times provides a ranking of European schools.

Again, none of these rankings is a substitute for research, but they can be a launch pad.

In a nutshell, use the data in these databanks to help you rank programs according to your values, preferences, and criteria while taking into account your qualifications, goals, and personal preferences.

The rankings are not objective measures of educational quality that apply across the board to all students. Nothing fits that bill. Educational quality is highly subjective, and experts debate it endlessly. Moreover, student objectives vary so “quality” differs from student to student.

For example, a female student interested in strategy consulting wants to attend a business school with a strong women’s network. She is interested in the surveys conducted by US News and BusinessWeek on leading schools in general management. In addition, The Financial Times allows her to rank schools based on the percentage of women in class and on faculty. However, no single ranking replicates her criteria exactly. Furthermore, her decisive factors differ markedly from that of a married male applicant who prefers an urban school so his wife can find work more easily and who wants to go into portfolio management.

Similarly a pre-law student knows he wants to work for a big-name, corporate law firm. He may be more interested in Brian Leitner’s “The Top 15 Schools From Which the Most “Prestigious” Law Firms Hire New Lawyers” than US News law school rankings.

The rankings are misnamed to create excitement and sell magazines. They fulfill that mission extremely well. Understand their limitations.

Ahh, those rankings. Hated by some. Relied on with religious zeal by others. Should you praise them? Should you damn them? Should you use them?

Yes to the last question…with a few caveats. To use them intelligently you need to understand what they are, and what they aren’t.

What are the published rankings?

They are surveys, collections of data, and convenient ways to compare schools on specific criteria – usually fairly superficial metrics. They measure different qualities: reputation, student stats upon acceptance, ROI, recruiter satisfaction, bar passage rates (for law school), and more. Consequently schools can be ranked with wildly differing results depending on the criteria used.

For example, Harvard Business School is ranked #1 by US News in March 2008, #2 by BusinessWeek in Oct 2008, #3 by The Financial Times in January 2009, and #50 out of 50 in BusinessWeek’s inaugural ROI rankings, also published in late 2008. The criteria count.

Realize that each ranking will give a different result because each one measures different factors. It is incumbent upon you, the intelligent consumer and ultimate investor in your graduate education, to understand the differences and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.