Ranking B-Schools on Student Satisfaction

The latest 2010 survey of student satisfaction shows Virginia’s Darden School at the top, followed by Chicago’s Booth, MIT’s Sloan School, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and the Harvard Business School. Only three business schools scored double-digit gains in the latest graduate ranking: Michigan State’s Broad School leapt 20 places to 13th from a ranking of 33 in 2008. The University of Southern California’s Marshall School was ranked 9th, up 16 places in two years from 25th in 2008. Virginia’s Darden came next with a 13-place gain, ranking first from 14th in the previous survey (see How Darden Became Number One in Student Satisfaction).

The biggest losers in 2010? The University of Indiana’s Kelley School plummeted 17 spots to 26th from ninth in 2008. Wharton and New York University’s Stern School both fell eight places (Wharton to 11th from third and Stern to 20th from 12th).

Dramatic changes like these are exceeding rare, in part because BusinessWeek combines the latest survey results with two previous surveys. So any improvement BW picks up in its 2010 poll is suppressed by the addition of the results from 2008 and 2006. The latest poll gets half the weight in the graduate survey, with the two previous polls getting 25% each.

My thinking then and now was that anyone could get those numbers from the schools. Anyone could put together his or her own ranking with that data. What we were doing is putting valuable information—even intelligence–into the marketplace that would otherwise be completely unavailable. That is still true today, even as many others have rushed to copy what BusinessWeek pioneered.

As important as the recruiter and intellectual capital pieces of the BW ranking are, however, I still believe that the bottom line for business schools is how well they serve their students and graduates. MBAs, given their age and their work experience, are discerning enough to make valuable judgments about graduate education. Measuring the full MBA experience is what most applicants really want to know in making one of the most important decisions in their lives: whether to go to a business school and which one to go to.

The greatest concern over this survey is obvious: To the extent that MBA graduates are affecting the value of their degree when they fill this survey out, wouldn’t they simply rate their schools as high as possible? It turns out that there is, indeed, a fair amount of cheerleading that goes on in these surveys.

But because these grads have spent more than a quarter of a million dollars to get their degrees, they take the survey seriously. They tend to tell it like it is. And the few MBAs with an axe to grind, by the way, tend to cancel out the pure cheerleaders.

With survey response rates of 50% to 60%, the sample size gives greater reassurance in the result. BusinessWeek also employs statistical consultants to examine the completed surveys to insure there was no coaching or cheating.

Another legitimate concern is that the differences in scores on these questions are so minute that they are not statistically meaningful. That is often true, depending on the school and the specific question answered by a graduating MBA. Yet, when you add the scores from 50 or so questions together, the differences do tend to be relevant and meaningful–though not in every single case.

Then, there is the question of expectations. Do students at Harvard Business School have far higher expectations of their MBA experience than those at Notre Dame or Michigan State? It’s safe to say they do. If you go to the number one business school in the world, you expect nothing but the absolute best. So Harvard may, in fact, be at a disadvantage in a survey that measures graduate satisfaction even though the education and the experience it delivers to its students may be better than a school that ranks higher on this survey.

Bottom line: Like all rankings, this is a very useful source of information for applicants. You just simply need to be aware of the potential flaws and interpret the importance of these results for yourself.

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