List of United States Graduate Business School Rankings - Ranking Techniques

Ranking Techniques

The rankings are based on a variety of factors such as standardized test scores of students, salary of recent graduates, survey results of graduates and/or recruiters, the specific schools that choose to participate in a market survey, the number of top companies recruiting at the school and a variety of attributes. The ratings vary significantly by method used to determine the success of each program. For instance, the Forbes and Financial Times results are based on long-term graduate career progress concerns, the Bloomberg Businessweek and Economist polls evaluate short-term experiences of the students with their program, U.S. News & World Report consider the recent experiences of recruiters with the program, and other rankings like the Aspen Institute Beyond Grey Pinstripes measure integration of sustainability material into business programs.

The U.S. News & World Report uses a combination of the objective and subjective as well. The magazine seeks "expert opinion about program quality and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school's faculty, research, and students." However, it ranks a broad spectrum of professional school programs such as business schools, law schools, and medical schools as well as a variety of programs specific academic disciplines such as the social sciences or humanities. The business opinion data incorporates responses from deans, program directors, and senior faculty about the academic quality of their programs as well as the opinions of professionals who actually do the hiring of the new MBA graduates from the schools. The statistical data combines measures of the qualities of the incoming students and as well as the faculty with measures of post graduate success as related to their degrees. There were 382 programs that responded out of 402 solicited, and the formula used a strict combination of quality assessment (40%), placement success (35%), and student selectivity (25%).

The Bloomberg Businessweek rankings, which are based on three sources of data (a student survey, a survey of corporate recruiters, and an intellectual capital rating), are published in mid-October of even numbered years. The 2006 student survey of 45 online questions of students' ratings of their programs was distributed to 16,595 students three weeks before graduation; there were 9,290 responses. The recruiter survey determines how many MBAs a recruiter's company hired in the previous two years and which schools it actively recruits from. 223 respondents participated out of 426 solicited. The intellectual capital is determined based on a formula incorporating academic publications in journals, books written, and faculty size.

The Forbes magazine methodology was to calculate a five year return on investment for 2002 graduates. Forbes surveyed 18,500 alumni of 102 MBA programs and used their pre-enrollment and post-graduate business school salary information as a basis for comparing post-MBA compensation with the cost of attending the programs.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the Economist Group, gathered results from two internet questionnaires, one of business schools and one of their students and recent graduates, and used them to rate business schools located all over the world. Information provided by the schools made up 80% of the ranking, with student and alumni responses accounting for only 20%. Factors in the evaluation included faculty:student ratio, GMAT scores of incoming students, student body diversity, foreign languages offered, percentage of graduates finding jobs within three months after graduation, percentage of graduates finding jobs through the school's career service, graduates' salaries and the comparison of pre-enrollment and post-graduation salaries, and student/alumni evaluations of the program, facilities, services, and alumni network. Results were tabulated using a smoothing method incorporating the three previous years' results. The organization used strict data provision thresholds, with the result that some highly regarded schools were omitted from the list of 100 ranked schools.

The Financial Times poll was the result of over 10,000 respondents to nearly 23000 electronic questionnaires of alumni from 155 qualifying business schools. The survey began in July 2006 and all internationally accredited programs that are at least five years old and that have produced at least 30 graduates in each of the last three years were solicited. 113 of the 155 had at least 20 respondents and at least a 20 percent response rate. The questionnaire used twenty criteria in three main areas. The poll actually presents all twenty criteria to the reader. Eight criteria are based on alumni responses; eleven criteria are based on business school responses, and the final criterion is based on a research index produced by the Financial Times. The survey responses are audited by KPMG.

The Financial Times has also produced a "ranking of rankings" summarizing five of the individual rankings (The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Financial Times). They produce United States, and European summary rankings based on all five and a global summary ranking using the Wall Street Journal, Economist and Financial Times. The summary is based on underlying polls in which a school placed in the top ten using an average of the ordinal placements. The summary excludes the U.S. News & World Report results.

Poets&Quants also produced a composite of five major MBA rankings published by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Economist, The Financial Times, Forbes, and U.S. News & World Report. They blend these rankings using a system that takes into account each of their strengths as well as their flaws to come up with what is arguably the most authoritative and comprehensive ranking of MBA programs. The list is meant to eliminate anomalies and other statistical distortions that are often present in any single ranking.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities includes every institution that has any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medals, and highly-cited researchers. In addition, major universities of every country with significant amount of papers indexed by Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) are also included. Having alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes in Economics since 1951 attributes 10% of the score. Staff of an institution winning Turing Awards in computer science since 1961 contributes 15% of the score. Highly cited researchers in economics/business category get 25% weighting. Papers indexed in SSCI in economics/business fields gets 25%. Finally, the percentage of papers published in top 20% journals of economics/business fields to that in all economics/business journals gets 25% weighting.

Rankings based on attributes other than standardized test scores, salary of graduates, and similar attributes also exist. The Beyond Grey Pinstripes ranking, compiled by the Aspen Institute and published biannually, is based entirely on the integration of social and environmental stewardship into university curriculum and faculty research. Data for this survey is solicited from university administrators at accredited colleges, and audited by teams of Ph.D. scoring fellows. Rankings are calculated on the amount of sustainability coursework made available to students (20%), amount of student exposure to relevant material (25%), amount of coursework focused on stewardship by for-profit corporations (30%), and relevant faculty research (25%). The 2011 survey and ranking include data from 150 universities.