RANKINGS
Where to find good rankings of MBA programs and Business Schools?
What do the rankings mean?
How to interpret them?
posted by MBAblogger @ 8:22 AM
7 comments
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Friday, April 29, 2005
What do the rankings mean?
How to interpret them?
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7 Comments:
You need to be careful in interpreting Rankings. The more of them there are, the more difficult it becomes - as they do not all set out to measure the same thing. Best to look at lots and get an overall impression rather than focussing on one only. Try to be sure that the ones you study deal with what you are interested in. For example, if your interested in a part time program you may not get much from a ranking which deals only with full time programs (as most of them do). You could also try to look at the same rankings over a period of time to see whether a School is going up or down. Most of the major rankings are published regularly, for example the Financiual Times - one of the most rigorous - publish theirs every year.
If you are interestd in an American progam you will have more to look as many of the Rankings are A US oriented. Be careful about this as even rankings which appear international may only cover US or North American. A ranking which focusses on one country or region only is fine if you are interested in that area only. Be careful however as some rankings - e.g for Asia - are simply taken from one or more pf the internarional rankings and only feature the Schools that were in those original rankings.
If you are interestd in a specialist MBA or in Distance learning/On line program, you will find very little.
Perhaps the most comprehensive listing of rankings is at www.MBAinfo.com/rankings. MBAinfo also publish their own 'Super Rankings' based on data from intermnational rankings published over the past year. There are some oddities in this as much depends on what has been published - so for example if an otherwise obscure school, has featured in one ranking only that has been included in the data used it may appear motre prominent than it actually is.
In general you will find that most reputable rankings feature the same top Schools, and there can this be little douobt as to which these are. Sure they may change places a bit from yeur to year, but whilst that might matter a lot to the Deans of the Schools it probably doesnt matter much to you as whether a School is number 3 or 4 is not likely to deterine your choice. More problematic is if you are interested on a second or third tier School - especially if it is a regional one - as they may not feature at all in some rankings. It should not follow from this that such a School may not be the one for you, after all there are several thousands of Schools and the biggest Ranking only lists 100 or so of them.
Perhaps the main rankings are as follows:
Financial Times
Business Week
U S News and World Report
Economist Intelligence Unit
Wall Street Journal
Forbes
There are some places to find sevaral rankings reported/compared:
www.bschool.com
www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rankings.htm
http://business majors.about.com/od/rankings
www.mba-programs.info/business-school-rankings.htm
www.careerdynamo.com/business-schools/uk.html
www.foreignmba,com
www.MBAinfo.com/rankings
There is one point that I would emphasize -
Some major Schools now choose not to be involved in some rankings exercises. In particular, both Harvard and Wharton have declined to give publications access to some of the data they need in compiling their rankings. So for example, neither if these Schools feature in the latest (2005) ranking published by 'Which MBA' (EIU). So, its important to realize that the fact that if a School is not ranked it is not necessarily because it was not good enough to make it, it may be that it did not participate. Some rankings now list the Schools that did not participate (e.g 'Which MBA'), but many don't. So if you find that one of the major Schools, that you would expect to be highly ranked, is not listed - it is perhaps because it chose not to be.
Another point I should have added. It reinforces some comments made by others:
The different criteria used in these exercises can result is dramatically different rankings. For example: the 'Which MBA' ranking (2005) differs substantially in how it ranks certain Schools from that of the Wall Street Journal - yet both were publishes at about the same time. This is probably because 'Which MBA' uses lots of criteria, whereas WSJ uses only the opinions of recruiters. Needless to say, rankings based on different criteria can be equally relevant, but for different purposes, and it would be a mistake to assume that they all aim to do the same thing.
PS There is a good article on Rankings in 'The Economist', Sept 24th 2005, Pg 95. (It covers both of my points, in more detail)
I was browsing for MBA resources and I got to this page from www.bainfo.com, and I thought it's a good idea to share another very usefull web page that I came across and that is
www.mbapodcaster.com
Check them out and listen to theire MBA Ranking episode on theire podcast page.
Thanx for sharing info on mba
A different view on www.topmbarankings.info
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