7) School Momentum Stuffed In 2022

Who wouldn’t envy the University of Washington’s Foster School. Talk about corporate might! Puget Sound is home to category leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco, Expedia, Paccar, and Nordstrom. Grads earn big starting paychecks after graduation – and enjoy an intimate culture and project-based curriculum while they are MBA students. What’s not to love?

Despite this, Foster hasn’t been able to take the proverbial ‘next step.’ Five years ago, it ranked 27th with U.S. News before reaching 20th last year. In the 2022 ranking, Foster slid back to 22nd.  Call it a one step forward and one step back year. In starting pay and bonus – which carries a 14% weight – Foster grads enjoyed a $6,500 increase to $151,683. Problem is, job placement slid from 98.9% to 94.2% – a rate that still topped every Top 20 program. The school’s recruiter score surged from 3.3 to 3.4, but its acceptance rate added five points while its GMAT average dropped three points. 

That was the case for many of the most promising MBA programs in 2022. In a down year, most promising programs stalled; few were able to set themselves up to make a move.  Mind you, they weren’t zombies lugging along without spark or direction in a dystopian world. Instead, they were more like survivors, battening down with the hope that the worst would soon be over. 

You could say that also applies to Vanderbilt University’s Owen School. Ranked 29th just two years ago, the school held down its #23 spot again in the 2022 ranking.  With the Class of 2020, a $9,700 improvement in starting pay was negated by a 4.2% drop in placement. A 13.8% decrease in acceptance rate was undermined by a lower recruiter score and GMAT average. Along the same lines, the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School’s peer assessment score and pay increased, while its average GMAT and placement rates dipped.  Hence, the school remained anchored to the #20 spot. 

That’s hardly surprising. After all, the Top 20 remained essentially the same in 2022.  Just the Foster School tumbled out of the Top 20 (and it was tied at #20 last year to boot). In other words, the 2022 U.S. News ranking was essentially a re-run of the previous year, a lazy repeat of a formula with minor shuffling involved.  In a year when society was upended by a pandemic – and business schools often overhauled their instruction methodologies and admissions policies  it feels suspicious that so little change occurred in the top half of U.S. News’ ranking. Maybe it is a testament to the durability of the methodology. Most likely, it is a red flag that U.S. News may be measuring the wrong variables in the wrong amounts. 

8) The Year’s Winners and Losers

Most academics hate ratings. After all, growth is deeply personal and ever-evolving. And ranking measures rarely tell the full story. Just look at pay, which is heavily influenced by region, industry choices, and school reputation. High GMAT scores are flawed too. After all, how do you evaluate individual improvement over two years? Shouldn’t success be measured in which schools take their students’ problem-solving the furthest  

Yes, rankings are flawed instruments, subject to a publisher’s values and biases – and often lagging indicators of progress. That’s one reason why movement, up-or-down, doesn’t necessarily indicate a drop in quality or value. These changes, however, signify the need to dig deeper – and not take marketing fluff at face value. 

The University of Texas at Dallas’ Jindal School is a case in point. This school could be called one of the big winners in this year’s ranking. From 2016-2019, Jindal ranked between 37th and 40th. After springing up to 33rd last year, the program made it to 31st for 2022. One reason: recruiters are bullish on the school. The Jindal School averaged a 3.9 – the same score given by recruiters to #12 NYU Stern. That average was also higher than ones produced at in-state rivals Texas McCombs and Rice Jones. By the same token, its 90% placement rate topped 18 MBA programs ranked above it. The program’s Achilles Heel, like year’s past, remained pay. At $111,168, Jindal grads were paid less (on average) than peers at every school ranked above them – and behind all but five programs in the Top 50.

Ohio State’s Fisher College and Penn State’s Smeal College, two meat-and-potatoes Midwest programs, also performed well this year. Ranking 37th and 41st last year respectively, the programs tied at 33rd this go-around. In Fisher’s case, the program enjoyed a .10 of a point improvement in Peer and Recruiter scores, not to mention a near $15,000 improvement in starting pay (though GMATs plummeted by 13 points). For Smeal, the improvements came across the board, highlighted by a $9,500 boost in starting pay and a .20 of point improvement in the Recruiter score. The University of Tennessee’s Haslam School also moved up seven spots to crack the Top 40 at #39 – which was aided by an 11 point rise in average GMAT scores. In addition, Arizona State’s W. P. Carey School surged from 36th to 30th – though this is more of a re-adjustment as the program ranked 26th just two years ago.

Still, there were several schools that suffered modest setbacks. That includes Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, which was the only school to fall out of the Top 25 (to 26th).  The culprits: Declines in both average GMAT (9 points) and placement rate (4.8%). Notre Dame’s Mendoza College also tumbled from 30th to 36th (after ranking 26th just two years ago) – the product of drops in placement rate (11.5%) and starting pay ($7,200). Goizueta and Mendoza weren’t alone, as several more Top 50 programs lost ground,. They included the Wisconsin Business School (-5), Texas A&M’s Mays Business School (-6), University of Georgia’s Terry College (-6), and the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business (-13).