Criticism
The ranking of business schools has been discussed in articles and on academic websites. Critics of ranking methodologies maintain that any published rankings should be viewed with caution for the following reasons:
- Rankings may exhibit sampling bias by limiting the population size to a small number of schools, ignoring many with excellent offerings.
- The ranking methods may be subject to biases and statistically flawed methodologies, especially for methods relying on subjective interviews of hiring managers.
- The same list of well-known schools appears in each ranking with some variation in ranks, so a school ranked as number 1 in one list may be number 3 in another list.
- Rankings tend to concentrate on the school itself, but some schools offer programs of different qualities (e.g. a school may use highly reputable faculty to teach a daytime program, and use adjunct faculty in its evening program).
- A high rank in a national publication tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the specific case of MBA programs, one study found that objectively ranking MBA programs by a combination of graduates' starting salaries and average student GMAT score can reasonably duplicate the top 20 list of the national publications.
Read more about this topic: List Of United States Graduate Business School Rankings
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“As far as criticism is concerned, we don’t resent that unless it is absolutely biased, as it is in most cases.”
—John Vorster (1915–1983)