The Forbes Ranking is Out...

Hahahahaa... That is exactly what I thought. I dont think we need any MORE comments to ban this dude. Only promotions need "MORE" work, bans dont

Thank you Praet for taking care of this. It was definitely a bit jarring to see such posts on GMATClub, as everyone has been so supportive over the past few months.

Anyway, forcefeed, the Forbes ranking methods are kinda strange (UCLA is #21), even though it's based on ROI. You never really know if they're using averages, medians, 80% ranges, yadda yadda yadda...

You mean "Straight E"

The Wharton dean of admissions mentioned that Wharton do NOT participate in rankings for this particular reason - the various ranking criteria out there simply do not cater for everyone's tastes. He referred to this particular criteria as an example. I suspect that he had an inkling that Forbes are about to publish a ranking set that did not rate Wharton as number 1.

I wonder where AGSM sits in this ranking. The actual cost of an MBA at AGSM is $52 K AUD and then length is 16 months. The ROI figure will be pretty high considering the job markets in Asia have been booming in the last few years.

wow, some heated debate on gmat club

beny, it seems a bit hypocritical that you are chastising indians that only apply to h/s/w, while you are personally aiming solely for HBS

also...iirc pelihu didnt get into columbia, he was waitlisted but declined after getting his scholarship from darden

I have studied the Forbes ranking over the past few years. While reasonable minds can certainly differ over the use of an ROI metric, it seems to have at least some utility as an evaluation criterion when used in combination with other criteria.

The greater problem with the Forbes metric is that it just isn't executed very well. The calculation is profoundly sensitive to specification so that even even small changes can cause major changes in the ranking of programs (in other words, it exhibits high levels of ordinal fragility). When I recreated their rankings, I found that schools were often separated by less than 1% net benefit, a difference that was so small that it was swamped by small changes in specification.

The are two major omissions-

1) A rigorous model would incorporate taxation at the state and local level. While this might sound trivial at first, consider that some states have no state income tax while others have tax rates greater than 5%. Over the course of five years, the net benefit (after tax) of students in low tax regimes would be several thousand dollars higher than that of students in high tax regimes.

2) A rigorous model would take into account cost of living for different regions of the US. Depending on how one measures COL, one dollar in a less expensive region like St. Louis could easily be the equivalent of $1.50 or more in other parts of the country. Adjusting for COL can cause programs to shift several places.

Another significant problem is that the calculation is biased against public universities that offer significant savings for in-state residents (recall that the calculation is based on out of state tuition). When I adjusted the figure for UCLA in 2003, the school jumped from a rather mediocre #18 (including intl. schools) to a far more impressive #5. The same basic pattern can be observed with Texas and UCB. As an aside, it is a bit odd that they use the current tuition to compare schools when it would be more logical to use the tuition of schools at the time that the cohort was attending school.

One of zee best posts on gmatclub I have ever seen.........why do all the fun posts happen when I am away from the net.

Hopefully we'll have beny part 2 in our midst soon

Thank you Hjort for the clear and detailed explanation. It is very good to know the intricacies of how the Forbes ranking was developed.

@Hjort - I thought I read that they did a COL adjustment

The problem I have with this rankins is that it tells you absoloutly nothing about your situation. They are basically comparing before and after salaries as well as lost wages. While I think you should look at your PERSONAL ROI, a school average does no good. After all if the school takes in a bunch of people who make $40,000 and after graduation they make $85,000 their ROI will be high due to the fact that their starting salary and lost wages will be low. This will mean absolutely nothing to you if you make $70,000 going in.

Another weakness of the ROI is that it benefits the schools that place a lot of people in the finance field. One person in a class making 10 million a year at a hedge fund is going to pull the average way up. Much like how having a couple of 40 year olds in a class manages to balance out all of the 24 year olds in the class profile.

They should be able to compensate for this by removing the outliers. However I dont know if they do.

- Clap Clap - Very well said. Thank you kryzak.

Weird, I really didn't find anything posted by beny to be terribly offensive. I did, however, find the personal attacks and name calling against him to be much more distasteful. I mean are there loads of unqualified Indians applying to H/S/W or any other top program every year? Of course, same can be said of any other race/ethnicity. I am Chinese and I can tell you there are plenty of unqualified Chinese applying to H/S/W, big deal, it's not like I'm knocking my own race, it's simply a fact. There's a reason why H/S/W is everyone's reach school. My guess is that beny is probably Indian as well.

I agree...the ban was a bit dramatic. But oh well, these rankings always cause a big buzz.

I actually laughed out loud at these.

I think that we could replace "Indians" by "people" in your comment, and it would still be true.

Just a thought.

L.

I believe beny is Korean, based on his blog.

I didn't find his posts offensive because of his name calling (again, *I* didn't ban beny) , I found his posts offensive because of the tone and attitude he used to generalize and accuse groups of people for certain things. Yes, the "response" attacks were also not ok, that's why I asked the member involved to take the "high road" and tone down. It is the initiator that I find at fault for igniting this "firestorm", and I'm glad that we calmed the others down quickly enough so that the discussion resumed in our usual, friendly, and nice way.