BusinessWeek 2012 MBA Rankings

Businessweek came out with their new 2012 MBA rankings today. Here is the list:
30. Georgetown (McDonough)
29. Southern Methodist (Cox)
28. USC (Marshall)
27. Ohio State (Fisher)
26. Texas A&M (Mays)
25. Vanderbilt (Owen)
24. Maryland (Smith)
23. Georgia Tech (Scheller)
22. Emory (Gouizueta)
21. Yale
20. Notre Dame (Mendoza)
19. Texas-Austin (McCombs)
18. UCLA (Anderson)
17. North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)
16. NYU (Stern)
15. Indiana (Kelley)
14.Columbia
13. UC Berkeley (Haas)
12. Dartmouth (Tuck)
11. Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
10.Virginia (Darden)
9. MIT (Sloan)
8. Michigan (Ross)
7. Cornell (Johnson)
6. Duke (Fuqua)
5. Northwestern (Kellogg)
4.Stanford
3. Pennsylvania (Wharton)
2. Harvard
1. Chicago Booth

Here is the transcript discussing the rankings: https://staging.mzinga.com/n/pfx/forum.a ... ats&ptpw=y

They should post it to their website sometime in the not too distant future.

Looks like huge jumps for Carnegie Mellon (CMU) and Cornell! Congrats to those schools.

I see Yale is still sitting outside of the top 20.. hmm.

BW has a ..lets call it unique way of looking at rankings. A vast majority of the overall score is for "student satisfaction" and "employer satisfaction", with a minor part of the score being made up by "intellectual capital".

While these are some of the factors necessary for ranking schools, in my opinion, its not all inclusive. I find their rankings interesting, but I offer them little weight in my own rankings.

https://www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... ls-ranking

As 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.

Wow. CBS dropped big.

BW must of heard that I got in.

One of the interesting things, I think, is that the employer survey seems to lend weight to larger programs. It makes sense, when you think about it, that larger programs are sending more MBAs to more companies, and in larger numbers. If you break the schools into their typical perceived groupings, you notice that the smaller programs are almost always at the bottom of a given group (Stanford below H/W, for example).

As with any ranking, it means exactly what you allow it to mean. Either a program is right for you and your goals, or it's not. As someone interested in smaller programs, however, it was startling to see the trend.

One question I do have, though, is how the letter grades are assigned? It's strange to see A+ across the board for schools that are ranked well below others with a B or two.

From an admissions perspective, we never took much stock in these surveys. One thing that we noticed was that those schools with the most aggressive public relations initiatives always did the best. Also, we always gave our consumer - the business school applicants - credit in figuring out which schools were best for them -- as just because a school is ranked high in this survey does not mean that it is the right program for you. Candidates should choose the program that has the resources, focus, philosophy and energy that they are looking for; not choose a program based on some model that is not so transparent.

Kimberly Plaga
Senior Admissions Consultant
Manhattan Review

You are definitely right; a smaller program does affect employer survey. Yield is important for employers, and there are only so many students available at the smaller programs. That aside, an important factor influencing the survey is the diversity of employers recruiting at the school. If a school is strongly aligned in a certain industry, and they may not get as many response from recruiters in other industries. This may be the case for NYU.

Has anyone spent time on the individual school pages, I love this new layout. Great free resource for information on schools IMO

Thanks for the heads up! I hadn't realized they had revamped their school profiles. I LOVE all the information BW provides in its school profiles.

I already posted my thoughts in the CBS thread but I'll reiterate them here. Rankings don't take location into account so I'm going to throw that out as well because individuals preference to location really doesn't say anything about the quality of the school. That being said, I don't believe for a minute that given the choice between Columbia and Ross, Tepper, Haas, Johnson or Fuqua anybody would turn down admission to Columbia. None of these are bad programs but nobody realistically believes Michigan is a better MBA than Columbia.

Okay, this makes no sense.

1) US News, which many will consider the most legitimate, ranks Haas above Columbia.
2) I would argue there are relatively few cases where you would choose Columbia over the other schools on your list. If you look at a specialty ranking that isn't for finance, Columbia will rank lower than most of these schools for most specialties.
3) There are plenty of people that could get into Columbia that don't even apply there.

This is the problem. People have bias based on the schools that they are applying to. This bias gets even worse after you've attended a school.

Columbia over Johnson or Tepper, probably so. Columbia over Haas, absolutely not.

Agreed. I could see someone choosing Fuqua/Ross/Haas over CBS. I would probably say the same about Tepper/Johnson, too, had I looked into them at all (they weren't on my radar). Everybody has their own motivations for applying to b school, after all.

Yeah, I think Haas sits above Columbia for a lot of folks in their internal ranking. I know I never even considered applying to Columbia, but was very close to applying to Haas and probably would have had I not gotten into Booth first. The reason I like the BW rankings is because they do the best job of capturing how much attending a given program IMPROVES your position. It's true that people coming out of HBS and Stanford land some really fantastic gigs, but they also went in with some pretty amazing resumes. Therefore, it seems these top two do very little to actually improve one's opportunity set. On the flip side, lots of my friends at Chicago (including myself) came from sort of lesser known, or somewhat less prestigious firms pre-MBA, and then they were able to land at their absolute top choices for career and firm post business school. That to me signals that the school actually added a lot of value for us.

If your use of rankings is to see which school will produce alums that will earn the most $$$ over the course of their career, yeah, USN is probably going to be more accurate. But I think for applicants who are a little more self aware of where they actually stand among the pool of applicants, BW is going to be more relevant.

Maybe it's just me but it seems like Columbia has been slipping. Big drops in applications, bad experiences with current students, etc. That was one school I never planned on applying to.

Posted from my mobile device

Here's a very good article that I found on Poets and Quants: https://poetsandquants.com/2010/06/28/tu ... -rankings/