Can You Trust This Online MBA Ranking?

COMMENTARY:

Business school rankings have become as common as UFO sightings a few years ago—and more often than not lists that purport to measure the quality of an MBA experience is an unidentified flying object of sorts.

Even at the highest level—the five most influential rankings of MBA programs by U.S. News & World Report, The Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist and Forbes—they are filled with substantial flaws, intellectual dishonesty, and downright stupidity by people who design the often senseless methodologies.

But at least in those rankings, you know exactly what is getting measured. The inputs and outputs are fairly transparent, along with the weights applied to each metric used to crank out the ranking. Which leads us to the most important advice for every applicant looking at a ranking: If there is little to no transparency in a ranking, it has flunked the smell test. Pay no attention whatsoever to it because the “ranking” is little more than an attempt to generate clicks on the Web. Nothing more. Nothing less.

THE LAUGHING STOCK OF THE RANKINGS COMES OUT WITH ANOTHER LAUGHING STOCK

That’s the case with the latest ranking by the Princeton Review, published yesterday (May 12), of online MBA programs. This is the first time the test prep company has ranked online offerings. Its ranking of the best business schools and programs for entrepreneurship has long been considered by many “the laughing stock” of all the rankings. So there’s little surprise that this new list of online programs would be any different.

Here’s the basic problem: The Princeton Review fails to disclose exactly how it is ranking these programs so no ONE really knows what exactly is being measured. The organization vaguely says the ranking is “based on comprehensive surveys conducted in the 2014 academic year of students and administrators at MBA programs offering at least 75% of their program of study online.”

A VAGUE METHODOLOGY THAT DOESN’T TELL YOU SQUAT

The most detail you get into the methodology is reduced to two vague sentences:

“The survey for school administrators, which evaluated more than 30 fields, covers admissions selectivity, graduation and retention rates, faculty training and credentials, technological infrastructure, student indebtedness, and career outcomes among other items.”

“The survey for students, which also evaluates more than 30 unique fields, allows students to rate their faculty, their fellow students, career preparation, academics, the technology platform, and overall satisfaction with their programs.”

How Two Online MBA Rankings Compare

 

School	Princeton Review Rank	U.S. News Rank
North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)	1	1
Indiana (Kelley)	2	1
IE Business School	3	NR
Arizona State (Carey)	4	4
Temple (Fox)	5	1
Florida (Hough)	6	4
Rochester Institute of Tech (Saunders)	7	25
Thunderbird	8	21
Texas-Dallas (Jindal)	9	6
Northeastern (D’Amore-McKim)	10	36
James Madison	11	12
Auburn (Harbert)	12	10
North Dakota	13	32
North Texas	14	47
Hofstra (Zarb)	15	41
South Dakota (Beacom)	16	41
Nebraska-Lincoln	17	21
Syracuse (Whitman)	18	57
George Washington	19	44
North Carolina State	20	9
West Georgia (Richards)	21	44
State University of New York-Oswego	22	57
Memphis (Fogelman)	23	66
Nevada-Reno	24	29
Washington State (Carson)	25	21

Source: Poets&Quants analysis of U.S. News and Princeton Review 2015 rankings of online MBA programs