List of United States Graduate Business School Rankings - Criticism

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.