2014 US News Business School Ranking

updated with detailed stats of top 105 schools in excel file.

Thanks for the heads up!

Just a clarification.... Foster is not 24th... it's tied for 23rd.

That's a crazy jump from foster. I was strongly considering applying, and was around half way through the app when my wife changed her mind about living on the west coast. I'm a big fan of their program, and thinks its a great way into the big name companies in Seattle.

After reading about how these ranks are calculated, I've come to the conclusion that US News is borderline trash. 25%, the largest single chunk, on peer assessment? That just guarantees a certain level of stability, as the ranks reinforce deans' perceptions, which reinforce ranks, which reinforces.....you get the idea.

And GMAT weighs more than recruiter assessment score? You mean, some test which has dubious predictive ability beyond the 1st year of b-school is more important than getting those job opportunities that could shape our entire career? Add in GPA, and almost a quarter of the score is based on academics - this just sounds too high. Basically, too much is made of the kinds of students come into a program (gmat, gpa) and not enough on what kinds of students come out of a program (recruiter assessment, starting salary).

You would think b-school is a bastion of free market capitalists, and the ratio of demand to supply - i.e the acceptance rate - would tell us a lot about how each school is perceived in the marketplace. Surely Harvard gets a lot of apps because it is perceived to be the best, which is what a ranking is all about? But lo, US News only thinks this is worth 1%! Crazy.

Plus, I wonder about the "starting salary" metric - it rewards a school for being finance or consulting heavy. I'm not sure if this is right or wrong, but it's something to think about.

Lastly, I have to wonder about response rates - 43% of those surveyed responded to peer assessment, while a dismal 16% of corporate recruiters responded to their piece of the survey? I don't think you need a stats class to tell you that the confidence intervals on this stuff must be huge.

The rating system definitely is flawed, but what other system do we have to measure? Maybe a student satisfaction survey one year out of the program, or five years out of the program? Maybe GMATclub should develop its own rankings!

Edit: scratch that: the-all-new-gmatclub-business-school-rankings-58341.html

+1

Nice write-up.

Completely agree that the survey results are a "self-fulfilling prophecy." All they do is ask both b-school administrators and recruiters "to rate programs on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (outstanding)." My guess is that these results are heavily influenced by prior year(s) rankings for the top 20 (or so) schools. For lower ranked schools, a lack of program awareness and questionable response rates yield big fluctuations in the data (and hence the overall ranking). The fact that these results represent 40% of the overall score makes no sense to me.

Regarding the starting salary metric, they also don't take into account geographic differences...

This is why I prefer the Poets and Quants ranking. It takes into consideration multiple publications.

That said, the raw data is flawed anyway, and rankings should only serve as a guideline.

I think these rankings didn't tell us anything new. Very predictable. The top 10 is pretty much the same, the 10-20 the same with very small changes.

Exactly. And keep in mind that rankings have to change a little bit from year to year in order to sell magazines - it wouldn't be news if the rankings were the same as last year.

In reality, I don't think there is significant change from year to year...i.e. schools don't break into a higher tier or drop down into a lower one. For example, the big news this time was how Yale dropped 3 spots, but it's still in that 10-16 tier. Booth dropped a bit, but is still a locked into the 4-9 tier, and of course, the HSW holy trinity remains intact.

out of curiosity. anyone have details on the numerical "overall scores" didnt notice that in the excel file?