It's odd, but the only thing I really care about in the USN metrics is the Quality Assessment. Otherwise, I think you need to look at the rankings in terms of where the school sits in the location and industry you intend to join after school.
If you look at the US News methodology (
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-gr ... ethodology), you see these categories: Quality Assessment (40%), Placement Success (35%), and Student Selectivity (25%).
Placement success has tightly bunched salary and %employed after 3 months of graduation data; I think Marshall is competitive with its peers in that area (particularly in consulting, finance, and tech, if you check out the latest Marshall employment report - the median consulting salary for a Marshall grad is $135k!). If you look at the Forbes rankings, the 5-year out average salary (NOT the gain, the salary numbers ranked) for Marshall is 17th, near peers (in my mind) UCLA, Duke, and UT (
https://www.forbes.com/business-schools/ ... verse:true)
Student selectivity - Marshall didn't up its GMAT or GPA stats. Other similarly ranked schools might have. Does that matter? Many of the schools in the top 30 did not change much in their GPA/GMAT averages. If a few schools around Marshall did, does that make Marshall worse?
Quality Assessment: Okay, I care about this, but with a grain of salt. I want to know the Peer Assessment Score and Recruiter Assessment Score and whether that's going up or down. This is a kind-of representation of brand quality.
BUT
We all must realize that if you are NOT recruiting into consulting or finance (so the other half of a bschool class, or less depending on the school), your target industry's assessments, and the assessments of the school's peers, will matter less. If schools only care about churning MBB consultants with the highest salaries, they may rank a school 'lower'. But where does NYU or Yale rank on getting people jobs in LA or SF?
If you're a hot Bay Area or LA startup, or a less sexy large company (think NetApp, eBay, PayPal) - what are your rankings of MBA programs? Where are you recruiting first? Stanford, Haas, Anderson, Marshall. Sure, people from other MBAs work at these companies - but a lot less, and there are a lot less people from those schools in OTHER industries in the area. If you want to go into entertainment or digital media, where does USC rank? Pretty effing high. Is Cornell or WashU or Vanderbilt or Washington or Georgetown or Rice ahead of Marshall in those rankings? No. Are they ahead of Marshall in the ranking of SF or LA consultancies or banks? No. All but a select few of the business schools are regional, so while it's mildly irritating that USC is ranked below these other schools, unless Marshall is actually a legitimately worse educational experience (didn't see any measure of that in the USN rankings) or actually produces crappy graduates (is the Trojan Network the biggest hoax of all time??), then I think we can sleep easy on this one.
And yes, this is me trying to work out in a public forum whether these rankings mean something so I can in fact go to sleep tonight, lol
jbmnyc wrote:
Disappointing to see Marshall drop in rankings this year. Was 25 in US News in 2015, dropped to 31 in 2016 ranking list published today.
I know there are 20 top 10 schools and to take all rankings with a grain of salt, etc... But brand certainly does matter. Thoughts on such a huge drop?