The Biggest B-School Scandals Of 2021

Stanford GSB students were reportedly a bit too cavalier about coronavirus precautions in the winter of 2020-2021. File photo

2021: ANOTHER YEAR OF CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWNS, MISBEHAVIOR — AND PROTESTS

2020 saw plenty of shenanigans by MBA students that led to discipline or worse, including campus lockdowns. 2021, unfortunately, continued the trend.

Stanford Graduate School of Business had a widely publicized Covid-19 outbreak in January that we reported in February: Mansion Parties, Tahoe Trips & Wine Weekends: Covid Rulebreaking Reported At Stanford GSB. That month, Harvard Business School reported that it had seen more than 80 positive cases among students and faculty since the start of the year.

HBS had another flareup in April, and again in September; in the latter case, the school was criticized for moving to remote instruction too quickly, though in fairness it has not had another outbreak since.

In March, Cornell Johnson was forced to move classes online because of a spike in cases linked to a St. Patrick’s Day party. Cornell would experience another shutdown, this time across the university, in December of this year.

In October, it was Northwestern Kellogg School of Management’s turn: Amid an alarming rise in cases, the school mandated increased testing and the temporary cancellation of all student-led and Kellogg social events of more than 25 people. Kellogg’s outbreak brought to mind the backlash in February as students protested what they viewed as overly strict limits on use of the school’s Hub and low volume of in-person classes. See here and here for our coverage.

Kellogg wasn’t the only B-school where students tired of Covid closures. In April at MIT Sloan School of Management, an uproar led to the school reversing stricter testing policies; several students reached out to P&Q to voice their dissatisfaction with the school’s approach to instruction. “This year,” wrote one student, “I paid $75k to mostly sit in my apartment, stare at my classmates through a computer screen, and be treated like a delinquent rather than someone who was doing her best to abide by Sloan’s policies…Right now it feels like robbery.”


BLOOMBERG BLOWS IT ON 2021-2022 MBA RANKING, REFUSES TO ACKNOWLEDGE MISTAKES

Bad rankings — with lousy methodology, or worse, an agenda and a thumb on the scale — are a fact of life in higher education, particularly in graduate business education. (See Poets&Quants‘ 2022 aggregate ranking for the best ranking out there.) 2021 brought that fact into sharp relief. Both The Economist and Fortune published MBA rankings that had glaring failings — but Bloomberg Businessweek‘s 2021-2022 MBA ranking blew them away, making the problems in those two pale in comparison.

Bloomberg apparently screwed up their ranking so badly, their results could not be replicated by an independent source — and the magazine refused to backtrack despite being cornered by the facts as presented by a Yale dean and Poets&Quants.

The red flags were immediately obvious, with Wharton dropping to ninth and four schools dropping out of the top 25. Then a sophisticated analysis of the Businessweek ranking carried out by Yale School of Management Deputy Dean Anjani Jain uncovered major errors. Using Businessweek’s reported scores for each school, Jain found that applying the stated weights to the five metrics used by the magazine would lead to results that are “egregiously off-kilter when compared to the published ranking.” And he calculated that the only way to replicate the ranks published by Businessweek is to apply a very different set of weights to the five metrics.

In fact, the recalculation by Jain would change the positions of 23 of the top 25 business schools — and in many cases, the changes would be so dramatic as to fuel suspicions that Businessweek’s editors may have felt the need to alter the results to preserve some sense of credibility. Applying the stated weights to scores published by Businessweek causes MIT’s Sloan School of Management to fall uncharacteristically to a rank of 21 from 7th; the Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas in Dallas to oddly skyrocket into the Top Ten, placing ninth, a rise of 22 places, and Emory University’s Goizueta Business School to achieve its highest rank ever in tenth place, eight spots better than the published ranking of 18th.

The failings of its new ranking even prompted questions about past Businessweek rankings and the magazine’s international rankingDefiant, a Bloomberg spokesperson told P&Q, “Neither Poets&Quants nor Yale had access to the raw scores that are used in calculating the ranking, which Businessweek pointed out to Yale multiple times prior to the analysis’ publication.”

THE TEN BIGGEST SURPRISES IN BLOOMBERG’S 2021 MBA RANKING

BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK’S MBA RANKING CANNOT BE REPLICATED BY THE PUBLISHED DATA

DID BUSINESSWEEK BOTCH ITS LATEST MBA RANKING?

BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK STANDS BY ITS 2021 MBA RANKING

WHY THE BUSINESSWEEK MBA RANKING CHALLENGE MATTERS

BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK TO DEAN QUESTIONING ITS RANKING: FUGGEDABOUTIT

See the next page for the biggest B-school scandal of 2021 … 

Questions about this article? Email us or leave a comment below.