LEAK?: USNews 2010 MBA Rankings | Yale SOM breaks top 10?

I looked at the video, took the screen shot and sharpened the blurry image and confirmed the top 10 in the list above is indeed correct. Not sure about ranking number but the order is correct.

Wow...that it interesting. When is it supposed to officially come out? End of the month?

I agree with the first dozen...after that I stopped trying to figure it out. Someone posted these on BW:

1 [1] Harvard (100) [100]
2 [1] Stanford (99) [100]
3 [4] Northwestern (95) [93]
3 [3] Penn (95) [95]
5 [4] MIT (92) [93]
6 [4] Chicago (91) [93]
7 [7] Berkeley (88) [89]
8 [7] Dartmouth (87) [89]
9 [9] Columbia (86) [88]
10 [13] Yale (85) [80]
11 [10] NYU (83) [84]
12 [14] Duke (82) [79]
13 [12] Michigan (81) [82]
14 [11] UCLA (80) [83]
15 [17] Carnegie Mellon (79) [77]
15 [14] UVA (79) [79]
17 [14] Cornell (76) [79]
18 [18] Texas-Austin (74) [74]
19 [22] Georgetown (73) [69]
20 [19] UNC (70) [72]
20 [21] USC (70) [70]

My squinting yields the same order...

Way to go Kellogg. #3 in both BW and US News!!

Assuming that is the real ranking and not just some mock-up...Its going to be interesting to see how this is talked about on BW. Booth has a lot of fanboys on that site and Yale is treated like a red-headed stepchild there. Booth now out of the top 5 but Yale jumps into the top 10. Its probably going to get nasty there when the rankings come out officially and the breakdown of figures are available.

Well this probably just gave Kellogg a slight bump in R2 yield haha.

There are a couple of other things I find interesting about this list, but I'll reserve me speculation until it is confirmed that these are the actual rankings. But I agree with you River, it will be funny to see people's reactions.

But the the lesson for me is this: rankings are quite transient, and one really shouldn't put too much stock in rankings, other than which schools belong to general ranges (say top 5, 5 to 10, 10 to 15, etc). If you get your heart set on going to the #3 school in the country, well, it just might not be #3 next year. But by the same token, it just might be #3, or maybe even #2, again the year after that. Just my opinion.

I think I am in the camp of non-believers. If it had been leaked, that would be on thing, but somehow I don't see them putting it in their own video, they'd have to know people would queue into it...it's probably just a teaser. It will be interesting to see the actual list.

If it is true, the hit from Wall Street and the City of London is already there, as both Booth and CBS have taken 2 points out. I'm not sure if that's the case though, as talking to friends of mine from several places (last week I met friends from Columbia, MIT, Wharton, Kellogg, and Harvard in NYC), it seems that the situation is the pretty much the same across the schools.

Anyway, more fuel for the bush until the rankings are out. And if this is true, fasten your seat belts, Yale is coming, I've been long saying that I believe Yale has all the "ingredients" to break into the so called Top schools.

Interesting if real.

Both the schools I am waiting on (CMU and gtown) both moved up, it doesn't make my decision easier

Has anybody read "Buzzmarketing"? (Second best book I have ever read).

I am not ruling out an attempt to get buzz for their rankings by USNews.

This is only my consipiracy theory, but if I were a marketer (and I am at heart) this is what I would do to get hits and generate additional interest in my rankings. I would post a fake ranking in the background of my video video and then use an unrelated account on my main competitor's forum to supposedly post a confident though unsubstantiated claim about the upcoming rankings.

Then I would let people rebuff the post and insult the poster.

A little later, I would post the source of the information through a different unrelated user.

ta da - instant buzz. All the users on my main competitor's forum are coming to visit my website for free. In a week when I post the real rankings, everyone will be discussing them because... they will be similar but not the same as the ones that supposedly leaked.

This will generate additional buzz - people will begin speculating whether they changed the rankings in the last moment because they leaked, or various other conspiracy theories.

I may be way off here, but if I was doing publicity for USNEWS, I would definitely try to pull something like this:)

(And this has nothing to do with the fact that I would LOVE to see Kellogg climb up in the rankings).

Added later:

Now we start seeing messages like this one... exactly what I would want if I were a marketer for the USNews ranking...

https://forums.businessweek.com/bw-bschools?msg=80749.36

river is now a fan of rankings

I'm not sure I'm getting the right video. I see a story about North Korea launching missiles and nothing at 0:55

Hey guys,

how come a reputed school like Johnson@cornell is doing so bad in rankings? Each year it keeps slipping down and this year at a paltry 17: the lowest ranked Ivy League business school.

Can someone give a factual critique?

Did they pull the video? When I click the link, it takes me to a video that has nothing to do with rankings.

Apparently the video was pulled. I still think its a buzz generating intentional "mess up".

Same here, first time I clicked the link I saw Obama talking about nuclear weapons. Next time some guy talking about the economy.

Anyway, I'm going to reserve judgment until the official rankings come out, since I think it unlikely US News would spoil the surprise in one of their own videos. But even then, I think people get way too worked up over rankings. At a high level, they can be helpful if you're comparing top 5 schools to say 20+, or looking at trends up/down over time, but at a detailed level, the difference between #3 and #4, or #10 and #11 is so small as to be immaterial. So even assuming the leaked rankings are correct, would I be happy to see Kellogg move up a notch? Yeah, sure. Do I think that by being #3 now and 'tied' with Wharton it's a better school than the 4th ranked Kellogg I applied to? Not at all.

Now I'm off to make some popcorn and watch the fireworks over at BW.