both Business Week and U.S. News & World Report border on recognizing this by using student selectivity as a screening criterion; they seem to place more significance on the issue of the number of students who are accepted. In both cases, what they are really measuring is not only the difficulty of the school’s admission standards, but brother cell phone list also the school’s ability to attract a high number of applications from unqualified applicants.
U.S. News & World Report added to its survey procedure
a ranking of the schools by the people who should know: the deans of the 270 MBA programs accredited by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. There are problems with that logic. First, based on the very high turnover rate of business school deans, a good many deans are new to the job (approximately ten percent each year) and don’t yet know very much
about their own school. Second, except for the few visits that a given dean may take to other schools – for the purpose of evaluating them for continued accreditation – even long-standing deans don’t really know much about more than a handful of schools. And finally, there are no criteria. Even if it’s possible for some deans to say “I know that School A has a more productive faculty than School B when it comes to academic publication,” that same dean may feel that School B has a better student body than School A.
What all the rankings want to do is understandable;
it may just not be possible. They want access to the vast store of collective human to measure a number of factors that they think are important, then statistically weight these factors and emerge with a single number depicting the overall quality of the school. U.S. News & World Report includes undergraduate grade point average, average GMAT score, the school’s acceptance rate, and enrolment yield as components of
the Student Selectivity criterion. To determine Placement Success, they measured the percentage of students employed after graduation, the ratio of graduates to employers recruiting on campus, and the average starting salary. Each of these aero leads factors can be objectively measured, and each of them might well tell something interesting about the school, but it certainly does not reveal the quality of research and teaching that goes on in the school, nor the quality and use of the facilities and equipment. And most of all, it does not measure the culture and values of the school, which are of crucial importance