2010 Businessweek Rankings

WUSTL and Maryland got beaten with a stick. Stern took an ugly one too...

Just more evidence that rankings don't actually mean anything.

1. There is NO WAY that MIT is #10.

2. Thank you for putting Cornell above Tuck (even though I question that)

3. Sorry to Cox alumni but Cox can't be higher than Tuck and Stern.

well they have their own formula and we dont... it is always best to just take the average of the rankings and go from there - or take out the best and worst ranking per school and avg the rest scores...

Frankly, if my MBA gets me a legal, 6-figure job, I am happy regardless of the school name

i doubt it. especially after finding out your friend making a lot more at same position from a higher ranking school :p.

Mmmm...
Post MBA pay for Tuck is 105,000 and 81,000 for Cox...

Cox starting salaries are $20,000+ below most of the top 20 schools, and that's only for the 2/3rds(!!!) of them that actually get jobs! Yet somehow they're right in the middle of the pack?

Also NYU drops 5 spots to #18 while USNWR has them moving up to #9 -- I can see different methodologies, but something this divergent makes my head scratch. Perhaps its because of the financial crisis, but still the job offers is at 90% and the salary is still 6-figures so I don't get it...

Most of the swings in BW rankings are being driven by their student/recruiter surveys, which they do not disclose methodologies for. That black box accounts for all the volatility and no one knows what is happening inside it.

money isnt everything!!!!

Sure -- but geeze when 1/3rd of the class doesn't have a job at all upon graduation that has to raise some eyebrows. I can find 13 schools better than one that only places 66% of its people.

but it sure buys a bunch of things

BW Rankings are a joke, nothing new here. However, I wasn't expecting anything as ridiculous as putting SMU (Cox) in the top 15. Now the rankings aren't even credible enough to provoke some friendly debate.

Rankings don't tell you anything if you don't understand the methodology behind those rankings. BW assigns 45% weightage to student perception of their program and 45% to recruiter perception of programs they have actively recruited from. So all this ranking really shows is how happy students are with the program they are attending and how happy recruiters are with the schools they recruit from. If recruiter A rates Cox 10/10 in comparison to her experience at Mendoza and recruiter B rates NYU 7/10 in comparison to his experience at Harvard, does that really tell you anything about the difference between the four schools? Not really. If students at Fuqua rate their program as 8.5/10 and students at MIT rate their program as 8/10 does this tell you that Fuqua is better than MIT? Not really, because the students are not comparing the two schools they're just assigning a rating to their own school. All the BW ranking shows is how happy students are with their OWN program and how happy recruiters are with a school in comparison to other schools THEY HAVE RECRUITED from. The BW ranking system would be more useful if applied to schools that are already grouped by tier based on more scientific ranking methodology i.e comparing just Tier 1 schools among each other, etc.

hence it is completely useless!

why do they survey schools' own students?? Schools can potentially tell the students that giving 10/10 will be beneficial to them since they will get a higher ranking. Ergo, the lower-ranked the school is, the more incentive it has to push its students to give 10/10, and more likely schools like SMU can end up in top 15. I just don't understand why BW does not even modify or correct its methodologies when the end result doesn't even pass the laugh test. Way to establish credibility for BW. Btw, who really reads bw for actual news and analysis?

By the same token, the "better" schools should be giving themselves 10/10 as well so they don't lose out to the lower-ranked schools. Adding to your point, everyone would be getting 10/10's and this stat would be irrelevant. However, this is not the case. The "better" schools are not getting 10/10 for some reason.