Having some fun - our own U.S. bschool rankings

I don't think rankings rarely ever convey ordering by cardinal means. More often than not, the rankings are ordinal, thus is hard to quantify exactly how much "better."

But I do agree that rankings tend to draw too much attention to minuscule differences between two schools that are roughly similar in quality.

That being said, the list looks reasonable. Although schools 11 through 16 seem more or less interchangeable and the ranking will be just as reasonable.

Your points are good ones. And, in fact, while we will always respond to a request for our opinion (clearly!) and give an "at gunpoint" list, it is true that using tiers is a better approach. We use tiers for quality, selectivity, reputation, etc. It is a more nuanced way to do it.

But we can all agree that when you slap together a list with no qualifying factors, nuance probably wasn't the goal.

This is just our version of "in a vacuum, if we were living life over again, and every school accepted us to attend, what would the order be in which we said yes."

Anyway, thanks for discussing and for reading. It's fun for us to talk about some broader things and not purely essay strategy all day, every day.

Cheers,
-PL

Paul, may I suggest another fun exercise? You can actually take schools clients submit as their dream or stretch ones and build the TIER list of those. It'll be interesting to see which schools are the most requested ( I believe you have wide enought customer base so it won't be sole HBS : )

We are actually working on that. We are taking inventory from all inquiries, initial consultations, and clients to see what schools are most "popular." There might be a little "noise" in the results because we are boutique and have a few items that have emerged as calling cards (our Columbia guide tends to draw more CBS applicants than some other schools, for instance). That said, the results should be interesting and once we have them, we will share them.

(Here's a sneak preview: NYU Stern is MUCH higher on the "popularity" list than it is on our ranking ... or really any other ranking, for that matter.)

-PL

I really like these rankings, but of course, I'm biased. I really like that Michigan was ahead of all of its peer schools!

In my own opinion, one cannot really distinguish Harvard from Stanford, Duke from Michigan, or Kellogg from Chicago. The type that gets into Duke is also the type that is likely to get into Michigan or Darden. That said, I prefer the following tiers:

1: Harvard/Stanford
2: Wharton
3: MIT/Booth/Kellogg/Columbia
4: Dartmouth/Berkeley
5: Yale/Stern/Ross/Fuqua/Anderson/Cornell/Darden

Entirely fair point. Nice job giving Wharton its own tier. That seems right to us as well.
-PL

I think the tier structure, without looking at specialty is:

1: Harvard/Stanford
2: Wharton/Sloan/Booth/Kellogg/Columbia
3: Haas/Stern/Fuqua/Ross/Yale
4: Anderson/Johnson/Darden

I think you are underrated Haas and overrating Yale, but otherwise, that seems pretty solid. I think our tier system looks more like mreevit's, but it seems that everyone on this side of the desk (applicants and consultants) have a pretty similar perspective - certainly more normalized than what you see in the actual rankings. Not that perception is reality, but it's interesting nonetheless.

-PL

This is the one I lean towards (Amerasia's is quite good). I'd put an asterisk on Wharton, which is closer to being part of the Harvard/Stanford tier than anything else, and on Columbia, which I think tilts towards Dartmouth and Berkeley.

I know people don't care about as much about schools outside of top-16 but here's my rank of schools such schools:

17. USC
18. UT - Austin
19. Carnegie Mellon
20. UNC - Chapel Hill
21. Washington University in St. Louis
22. Georgetown
23. Boston University
24. University of Minnesota
25. University of Notre Dame