BusinessWeek 2012 MBA Rankings

Therefore look at this:

https://images.businessweek.com/slidesho ... or-mba-pay

which places Yale at 10... rightly placed...

Getting an MBA is a 100,000 + investment, applicants put so much emphasis on rankings and hardly a handful even take a look at how they work, the strengths and weaknesses of each and the variables involved.

I cringe when I read someone saying X is better than A because BW says so, or USNews or Forbes.

Student satisfaction is a biggie on some of these rankings - some top schools get penalized because their students arrive with higher expectations, and although they end up getting job offers with higher starting salaries, more prestigious companies come to interview to campus and have a higher % of job placement at graduation.. these schools still receive lower marks because some students at not such top notch schools went with lower expectations and were pleasantly surprised with the job they ended up getting.

Recruits assessment is also a biggie, some smaller programs / located in isolated towns get penalized. These school might not be on top of mind for some companies. Being in a a smaller class with more interaction with professors and having the opportunity to focus more on your studies could mean that you will be much better prepared to go out into the job market and with some self initiative you can land an awesome job in a company that doesn't recruit on campus. Some companies simply don't go out of the way to an isolated school with a small class to recruit there, although they might have amazing students, which doesn't mean they wouldn't hire them if they decide to make the trek to interview in NYC/Boston.

As the previous poster mentioned - starting salary could be the best indicator - if you were to choose one of all factors. Since business school use one common denominator to compare us - the GMAT - I use starting salary, but as you know its a "holistic" approach, so other factors come into play.

I agree that we are all looking at a return on investment, but as a non-profit applicant I'm not measuring my growth by the salary jump. I'm not sure what percentage of people see money as their number what motivator, but I'm guessing it's quite low. It's obviously a perk for moving up in the career leader and hopefully more money also translates to more interesting jobs, but that's certainly not a guarantee.

For me all that matters is that my expectations are met. I expect to work alongside really bright students, have incredibly engaging professors, and graduate with tons of doors open to me.

Now, I don't think a rating should just be a "customer satisfaction" survey (students' or employers' for that matter), but I do think that GMAT and GPA are placeholders for the intellectual strength of a class. So these elements provide valuable information. They also add credibility to the prestige, which in turn makes the students more attractive to employers.

The best ranking ever for me is one that is almost completely transparent, which allows you to sort by different metrics. So if salary is my number one, I'll sort the data that way. Data--it's all in how you use it!

Essaysnark's comments seemed to be entirely around the application process and interaction with adcoms and almost nothing to do with the school itself once you're attending. I found this quite confusing and not really enlightening from the perspective of a current student. Are graduating MBAs filling out BW surveys really complaining about the admissions process from 3 years ago? I doubt it.

We've had town halls with the Dean trying to address some of the issues. That said, I'm a bit bewildered at how we can be doing so poorly on student satisfaction.

The rankings are silly. If you just ask random employers or students their opinion of a school, they will hold biases for many reasons (alumni, personal rejection, etc). I'm sure deutsche bank is upset that only 10% of harvard or stanford grads accept their offer, but that doesn't mean they are lower ranked schools.

The only thing most perspectives applicants really care about are the admission rates, the yields, starting salary, and career earnings of alumni. Any ranking that doesn't start off with some permutation of stanford, harvard, and wharton is clearly flawed.

I saw the new individual pages too. If you go on https://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings, Businessweek offers the school, what number it ranked at this year, the cost, and the total students per program. This new layout leads you to the individual pages for each ranked school. I have to agree, it's a great free resource for information on these schools.