Ranking The 2016 Business School Rankings

4A) Harvard Repeats as Best Domestic MBA According To Bloomberg Businessweek: Bloomberg Businessweek is the grand daddy of all business school rankings. In fact, the first ranking dates back to 1988, older than some first-year MBAs. It was the original and set the example. As a result, it carries a prestige that few rankings can match.

It may also be the easiest to understand. How is this for clear cut criteria? The employer survey is worth 35% of the weight. Alumni responses, worth 30%, cover quant measures like compensation and soft responses in job satisfaction and school experience. Alumni opinion carries twice the weight as student satisfaction (15%), where respondents can address such items as career services and faculty responsiveness. Salary rank and job placement rank get 10% each. In other words, surveys amount to 80% of the ranking.

That should make for a relatively even playing field, right? Sure, but the cream always rises, or so the cliché goes. Here, HBS again excels. It ranks 1st overall, nabbing a gold from alumni, a silver in terms of salary and a bronze from alumni. The only black mark was a 17th place finish in the student survey and 35th in job placement. How does Stanford, their main rival, fare? Like U.S. News, it was the runner-up, climbing five spots over the previous year. Stanford scored the highest marks of any school in the alumni survey, also topping Harvard in starting salary. Stanford’s downfall, however, was ranking 20th among recruiters, producing scores lower than such schools as Syracuse (Whitman), Purdue (Krannert), American University (Kogod), and Penn State (Smeal). The school could perhaps use some outreach to students too, finishing 25th in this metric. Most damning of all, on the surface at least, Stanford ranked 57th in placement. However, this is technically a misnomer. Why? Stanford grads enjoy far more options and opportunities, with graduates traditionally being choosey and taking more than three months after graduation to decide. Even more, they tend to gravitate more towards early stage firms, which aren’t part of Bloomberg Businessweek’s more mainstream corporate sample and do more just-in-time hiring.

Several business schools also made serious headway in the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking. Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, the darling of 2014 when it held the top spot, rebounded from a steep fall the following year to rank 3rd overall, generating their best marks in recruiter, alumni, and student surveys. More impressive yet, Dartmouth Tuck hiked nine spots for its first top five finish, with credit due to higher starting salaries and passionate endorsements from recruiters and alumni alike. Likewise, NYU Stern and Notre Dame Mendoza rose seven and six spots, respectively. In a major surprise, Brigham Young University’s Marriott School cracked the top 25, thanks (in part) to a top ten score in alumni satisfaction. The news wasn’t as upbeat in Evanston, as Kellogg toppled from 3rd to 9th, a result tied to losing ground in the employer (2nd to 7th), alumni (11th to 19th), and student (6th to 13th) surveys. UCLA (Anderson) also had to be shaken by a nine-spot drop to 22nd, marked by low scores from corporate recruiters and comparatively tepid job placement.

Among recruiters, MIT Sloan, University of Chicago Booth, Wharton, and Columbia earned the most votes after Harvard, with Carnegie Mellon Tepper)being the lowest-ranked program to make it into the top 10 on this measure. Outside of Palo Alto, the happiest alumni came from U.C.-Berkeley Haas, Harvard, Rice Jones, and Emory’s Goizueta School of Business. However, alumni and student sentiments sharply diverged on their schools. Students reserved their highest scores for Indiana University Kelley, which was trailed by the University Of Virginia Darden and Southern Methodist University Cox. To no one’s surprise, graduates from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT Sloan pulled down the highest starting salaries according to Bloomberg Businessweek. However, the best job placement was found at Rutgers, the University of Iowa’s Tippie School and Washington University’s Olin School.

4B) London Business School Bests INSEAD in Bloomberg Businessweek Rematch: It’s payback time. Remember how INSEAD climbed over LBS to take high honors with The Financial Times? Well, turnabout is fair play. That’s why it had to be satisfying for the LBS community to beat out INSEAD as the top international MBA program in the Bloomberg Businessweek’s best international business schools ranking. LBS turned in a perfect 100 index score, ranking top 10 in all five categories (with the methodology using the same dimensions and weights as the American ranking). The school came in 2nd in both the recruiter survey and salary ranking, 3rd in job placement, 4th in student satisfaction, and 6th among alumni. It was also the only school to achieve that feat, with IESE in Spain making the top 10 in four categories (and none higher than 4th). That’s how well-rounded LBS is. INSEAD was no slouch, however. Topping the recruiter rankings, INSEAD also claimed 2nd in the student survey and 5th in starting salary. Its Achilles heel, like Stanford, could be found in comparative job placement, where it rated 25th.

Several programs also made a statement in this ranking. Take U.K. jewels Oxford Said and Cambridge Judge. The former slipped past IE Business School to IMD to rank 3rd, an impressive three-spot shift set up by ranking 1st in alumni satisfaction and 3rd among recruiters.  Judge slumped four spots from eighth to fourth, with its strengths centered among alumni (3rd) and students (5th).

Indeed, this year’s ranking could be defined as one filled with great sorrow…and great joy! The biggest loser was undoubtedly Ontario’s Ivey Business School. Known for perfectly meshing the case method with experiential learning, Ivey had ranked 1st in the past two MBA rankings, a result driven by top marks from recruiters and students. However, 2016 served as a wake up call at Ivey, as the program sagged to 10th. The culprits? For one, recruiters ditched them in favor of INSEAD, LBS, Oxford, and IESE. Student scores also dropped to eighth. However, coming in dead last in salary was the final nail in the coffin. Conversely, SDA Bocconi leveraged top 10 scores from alumni and students into an eighth place finish, an impressive rise considering the program ranked 16th just four years ago.

5) University of Washington Debuts a “Do It Yourself” Ranking: Ever think the rankings don’t really address the factors that matter most to you? Don’t you wish you could just pick-and-choose the metrics that will impact your decision? Actually, you can do just that on an automated platform created by the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington in Seattle. You can even determine the weight to give each variable as well.

Here’s how it works. The Foster system encompasses 30 American MBA programs and covers 10 different ranking metrics, including average starting pay, job placement, return on investment, average debt, alumni advancement, faculty research, student selectivity, average GMAT, recruiter score (U.S. News) and academic score (U.S. News). Using a sliding scale, users can give different weights to the metrics, with a total index up to 100. After hitting the “Calculate” button, Foster will spit out a customized list of schools that best fit your custom methodology. Users can also modify the weights, so they can see how the schools shift as the proportions change.

Genius? No doubt! Don’t think the system is rigged to favor Foster. Instead, it is a starting point to get students thinking, says Dan Poston, assistant dean for the MBA program at Foster. “We know [potential students] are  going to look at where a school is located, what kinds of companies recruit here, how big is the program, the culture of the school – all of those factors,” Poston explains. “If you simplify one of the considerations they have – rankings – they have more time to consider all of the other individual factors that they are going to weigh in the process.”

Next Page: The Economist and Poets&Quants For Undergrads.