MBA News » Article

U.S. News: Stanford tops Harvard in 2012 best business schools ranking

MBA News Barbara Bierach / 05-02-2011

“U.S. News” did it again and surveyed 437 MBA programs to create a ranking of top business schools. First comes Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, followed by Harvard Business School and placed third is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Year on year the top ten saw only slight changes. The big news is there are a top 11 this year: Yale University’s School of Management cracked into the magazine’s top ten by drawing a tie with New York University’s Stern School (NYU) for tenth place. Yale was 11th last year, while NYU was ninth.

The magazine only ranks U.S.-based schools, unlike “BusinessWeek”, “Financial Times”, or “Economist” which publish global rankings. Therefore the “U.S. News” ranking is less influential as either the others. Also the “U.S. News” ranking has lately come under criticism from a famous staff writer of the “New Yorker”, Malcolm Gladwell. The bestselling author attacked the magazine’s methodology claiming that it was largely the result of arbitrary judgments made by the journalists like in car tests. “The ranking system looks a great deal like the ‘Car and Driver’ methodology. It is heterogeneous. It aims to compare Penn State – a very large, public, land-grant university with a low tuition and an economically diverse student body – with Yeshiva University, a small, expensive, private Jewish university,” writes Gladwell.

U.S. News ranks U.S. schools every year, using a vast amount of information and data. The methodology takes into account a “quality assessment” (40 per cent of the total score) consisting of ‘peer assessment score’, in fact a homemade survey of B-school deans and MBA directors, plus a recruiter assessment score. Also weighted is “placement success” (35 per cent of the total score), consisting of starting salaries, employment rates at and three months after graduation. The third block of data is “student selectivity” (weighted 25 per cent of the score), comprising students’ GMATs, undergraduate grade-point average and the percentage of applicants who are accepted to a school.

Critics may now say that MBA students do not care what educators think about the quality of a school's MBA education, they only want to know what recruiters think. If recruiters are going to the school and having a good experience with their hires, they will go back for more.

Others suggest that the weight on peer and recruiter assessments should be reduced since they may make the ranking rather subjective. In particular, many find the peer assessment debatable along the lines of: “If dean of School A is a friend of dean of School B, they will give each other high ratings...” Others think that everyone will always rank Harvard, Stanford and the MIT highly, just because of their brand names.

There may be a grain of truth in all these suggestions. But overall one has to accept that all rankings have some flaws. After all they are not a manual on “how to find the best business school” but only a tool to measure the relative value of one school along clearly defined criteria amongst a group of other business schools. No more – but no less either.

See the full ranking at: http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/mba-rankings
See Gladwell`s article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell