Just like many New Yorkers obsess about how much they pay in rent and how many Angelinos obsess about what kind of car you drive, many b-school students are rankings-obsessed. While our position has long been that students need to think about many factors (including a school’s ranking) before deciding which MBA program to attend, a new study finds that among all the business schools ranking, U.S. News’ remain the gold standard.
According to the article printed in the Journal of Marketing Education, “A Psychometric Assessment of the Businessweek, U.S. News & World Report and Financial Times Rankings of Business Schools’ MBA Programs,” the study finds that “comparing across media, we see that Businessweek varied quite a bit over its first 15 years or so (e.g., the formulae may have been changing, school sampling may have undergone changes, etc.), and it has become stable since approximately 2004. On this criterion, we can laud the U.S. News as yielding the most stable results, year to year, even from its inception. The Financial Times results are stable as well.”
The author of the study, a professor at Vanderbilt University, says that over time, U.S. News’ rankings have shown the most reliability, stability and objectivity.
While we are not playing favorites with the rankings, sharing this information with your students might be helpful to them in sorting out not just where a business school ranks, but who ranks them and who to trust.
