The Absolute Worst MBA Rankings

3) Fortune Magazine

A latecomer to MBA rankings, Fortune began tossing out their business school lists two years ago in 2021. From the start, we were unimpressed, even embarrassed for what was once a great business media brand. Fortune entered the market a full 33 years after Businessweek launched the first of the regularly published MBA rankings in 1988. You would think all that lapsed time gave Fortune editors the chance to put together a more valuable and credible ranking.

Unfortunately, not. Instead, Fortune rushed to publish a poorly conceived list for clickbait purposes. In the first go-round, the list was entirely U.S. centric, without a single MBA option outside the country. All of the published admissions data, which was not used in the ranking, was a year old. Four business schools that are always in Top 25 U.S. MBA lists apparently declined to cooperate with Fortune so they are missing from the ranking: the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, and Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business. Fortune says only 69 of the roughly 100 traditional full-time MBA programs invited to participate completed their questionnaires.

Ultimately, you have to wonder how useful a ranking can be when Lindenwood University, which admits 93% of its applicants, is ranked by Fortune as one of the country’s best MBA programs, while perennial high status players like Michigan, UCLA, USC Marshall and Emory don’t make the ranking at all, even though Fortune could have included them if it only bothered to pull pay and placement data from the schools’ employment reports of a year ago. After all, that salary and job info is the only school-provided data Fortune uses for the ranking. A few minutes of reporting work would have made a big difference to this ranking.

The bigger problem, however, is the methodology itself.

OVERWEIGHTING PAY AND TWO USELESS METRICS

In the very first ranking, Harvard was first, followed by Stanford, and Wharton. The latest 2022-2023 list published in October of 2022 (Fortune unexplainably skipped last year) has Harvard first again, with Chicago Booth and Northwestern Kellogg, in second and third place. The debut of this ranking with the usual triumvirate at the top is a reflection of the simple methodology and the heavy emphasis on pay. Fortune puts a 65% weight on starting salaries–both mean and median–without sign-on bonuses or other guaranteed comp–and job placement rates three months after graduation. The magazine does not disclose the precise weights for any one of these three metrics–a journalistic no-no for lacking simple transparency–nor does it adjust salary data for either industry choice or geography. The magazine also hides the underlying index scores for each numerical rank so a reader won’t know just how far ahead or behind any school is in this ranking.

A ranking that counts pay and placement to the tune of 65% is putting far too much emphasis on compensation–and in this case, merely base salaries. That kind of weight is nearly double the importance assigned to pay and placement by U.S. News or Bloomberg Businessweek. It is nearly triple the emphasis in The Economist‘s ranking, and considerably more than the Financial Times which assigns a 42% weight on those measures. The percentages, however, only get at some of the difference because other rankings have a more inclusive assessment of pay. U.S. News calculates sign-on bonuses and the percentage of graduates who get them. Businessweek does that but also adds in what alumni of a school’s program make. The Economist measures salary increases as well as base salaries for alumni. And the Financial Times also looks at salary increases, adjusting all the pay numbers by purchasing parity and for variations of pay between industries.

The other two final metrics employed by Fortune would naturally favor elite schools that boast large graduating classes, putting smaller high quality MBA programs at a disadvantage. A so-called “brand survey” supplemented by interviews of “thousands of business professionals and hiring managers” accounted for 25% of the ranking. The professionals had to know “at least two of the schools” for their votes to count, making this “brand survey” little more than a popularity contest with no adjustment when a respondent simply names his or her own alma mater. The remaining 10% weight reflected the number of each school’s MBA alumni who are C-suite executives at Fortune 1000 companies, a metric that favors old-school notions of size and largely ignores the most dynamic part of the economy as well as the largest employers of MBAs, the consulting industry.

The 2022-2023 Top Ten According To Fortune

DON’T MISS: Poets&Quants 2022-2023 MBA Ranking: A Surprising Change At The Top or A New Winner Tops Our 2022-2023 International MBA Ranking

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