New 2016 Businessweek Business School rankings are up

As much as I love to see Fuqua at the top spot, I think w/o H/S at the top 5 spot illegitimate the new BW rankings. I always liked BW ranking because it takes the qualitative into consideration, whereas USNews is very quantitative. I also think USNews “tamper” with the algorithm so that the same top schools always land on top to legitimize their ranking.

As someone who has been out of school, and seeing how people from different school’s career progressed, I believe school ranking is only a reference point. When it comes down to career performance, the factor that matters the most is the individual. Sure, your likelihood of “success” is higher with higher ranked schools. But that success may be more attributed to the individual than the school.

Pretty ridiculous rankings. Darden at 20 and duke at 1? They are peer schools, or at least equally competitive to get into (a measure of demand for the schools) which isn't a factor at all in these rankings

I agree, these rankings (in my perception) are off.

I'm not entirely sure how much I value the qualitative aspects in rankings. For what it's worth, 40% of USNews' ranking is qualitative as well (peer/recruiter perceptions of school).

Regarding BW, I value the 45% Employer Survey component, but I disagree with the value of Student Survey which adds to another whooping 45% of the ranking. But even within the Employer Survey rankings, I have trouble believing things such as: UNC ranks above Tuck or Tepper ranks above Sloan in Employer Surveys....

I think BW is better representative of the employers view of school graduates which adds a sense of practicality to the use of the ranking as a whole. However, I think taking that to the level where we see Duke and Yale placed in positions a lot better than HBS makes this ranking a bit off. This is not to say Duke doesn't have what makes it that special, it does! Out from all schools that I visited myself, I have not seen students feeling much connected to the school as I did when I visited Duke. And since 45% of the ranking weight was determined by students experience and satisfaction, I wouldn't find it surprising that Fuqua made it to the top 5.

The BW school rankings were a bit off-balanced before, and are now off-balanced in a different way. I think they are trying to differentiate themselves from US News, but that still means they need to have methodologies that make sense. Duke taking #1 honors above Wharton and waaay above HBS is nonsensical, and discredits their rankings. (It's almost like the US News fiasco from 1999...where they placed CalTech at #1 because they tweaked their methodology...after an uproar by EVERYONE (not just the schools), they had to retweak.)

The fact that schools move around so much in BW is a result of the fact that the scoring clusters the schools so close, that small changes in results can sway the rankings. In another word, instead of the linear appearance of 1, 2, 3 ranking, the schools are more grouped like 1, 1.01, 1.04, 1.045, 1.05, 2.02, 2.021... The usefulness of the ranking is to see the clustering within the rankings, since those schools are likely to have similar performance.

One thing I do like about BW is that it doesn’t tamper with the survey “noise”. Whereas I strongly believe USNews does. For example, for law school ranking, the same 14 schools are ALWAYS ranked in the top 14. It is hard for me to imagine that a #15 school (UT, UCLA, Vandy) has NEVER outperformed a #14 (Cornell, Georgetown) school in the history of USNews ranking. There have been many law school scandals, changes in regional economic prominence since the inception of USNews ranking. NEVER once is hard to imagine. Underdogs can get lucky once or twice, just look at all the Cinderella teams in March Madness.

For me, BW is like a startup. It’s trying to reflect the changing business school climate. USNews is like IBM, staying the conservative course -- “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

If you look at the ranking details, you'll see that Duke is actually ranked 22nd according to the Student Survey. They made #1 due to the Employer Survey portion and Intellectual Capital.
But even though 22nd doesn't sound that great, I'm fairly certain, as asmiov pointed out, that the Student Surveys are pretty clustered (who, other than myself, says bad things about their own school?)

The ranking details are also useful because they provide an Index Score, which gives more information than rankings alone.

https://www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... ings-table

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