https://www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... ls-rankingAs an applicant, I didn’t take much stock in the BW ranking. A lot of its placements didn’t make intuitive sense as opposed to, say, US News.
After the b-school, having interacted and talked with many more students and graduates from other schools, I believe more and more in the BW ranking. BW ranking’s purpose is to gauge the school based on two important aspects of b-school: 1) your experience there, and 2) the perception of you by your future employers. At the end of the day, those are the two things that matters. Scores, acceptance rate, reputation, etc. may matter to an applicant. To a certain extent they may influence for recruiting and class discussion. I guarantee that as a student or recruiter those are not high on your priority list. Success in life isn’t about being the one with the highest score; it’s about being the one who can get things done. Being smart is only one of the factors.
I think an even better indicator of school’s quality is the recruiter rankings. Those ratings are harder to juice. If you look at the top schools by recruiter ranking, it start to make a lot of sense, especially at the top, where data points are plenty.
Where the rankings break down is the specifics. I bet if you look at the raw data, the difference between a #5 school and #9 is so minimal, that it may not be statistically significant. It’s like trying to place a bunch of fashion models in line according to their “beauty”. The ranking can only give you a general feel for the schools, it can never tell if it one school is absolutely better than another. There are too many variables at play here.