LinkedIn’s Debut MBA Ranking: Shrewd Concept, Botched Execution

Harvard Business School

NO FIXED WEIGHTS, NO REAL DATA

The index issue is indicative of a bigger problem for LinkedIn: There is no raw data is doled out to readers to make up their own minds. Instead, business schools are simply assigned a rank, along with capsules that include a school’s location, most common industries, most common job types, top locations, most notable skills, and a short alumni testimonial. In themselves, these capsules quickly reveal important information about programs – data that otherwise requires a time-consuming combing of school employment reports. As a whole, they don’t lend themselves to side-by-side, school-against-school comparisons that reveal patterns. Without this underlying data, a ranking doesn’t mean all that much. The data scientists may have come up with a story outcome, but they’ve completely left out the joy of character and plot. It’s ranking cliff notes that dispense with any learning that can come from experiencing the actual journey.

This flaw is exacerbated by LinkedIn’s weighting system – or lack thereof. Weights demonstrate how much emphasis a particular variable receives. U.S. News, for example, follows a similar philosophy as LinkedIn and weighs outputs heavily. In this case, they receive half of the ranking weight between placement at graduation (10%), three months after graduation placement (20%), and mean starting pay (20%). That said, weight can be flexible. This past year, U.S. News tinkered with its MBA ranking weights. Notably, it dropped the weight of the academic survey (25%) and recruiter survey (15%) to 12.5% each to put greater emphasis on outcomes. Compare that to LinkedIn. Here, there are no indications whether Hiring and Demand has greater weight than Network Strength. It may have equal or lower weight – no one knows beyond a select team at LinkedIn.

To pile on further, the LinkedIn MBA ranking is truly an America First endeavor. Replicating the fatal flaw of the U.S. News ranking, LinkedIn fails to account for the quality of international programs. In The Financial Times – the one truly global MBA ranking – the Top 10 includes three non-American programs: INSEAD (2nd), IESE Business School (3rd), and SDA Bocconi (6th). The LinkedIn ranking also doesn’t include the London Business School and HEC Paris (which finished in the FT’s Top 10 just a year ago) or CEIBS (which cracked the FT’s Top 5 as recently as 2020). In fact, INSEAD and the London Business School have even ranked #1 with The Financial Times – three times each! Let’s face facts: many Americans head overseas for graduate business education. In 2023, for example, 13% of HEC Paris’ graduating class hailed from North America. For next spring’s graduating class at London Business School, that percentage is 15%. That’s a healthy share of Americans and Canadians to exclude.

Most glaring of all, LinkedIn’s MBA ranking may focus on outcomes, but it ignores a key piece of data: MBA pay. While first-year compensation can be gleaned from a school’s employment report, LinkedIn misses an opportunity to deliver a harder-to-find measure: pay growth over a five-year period. For a ranking grounded in outputs, LinkedIn shows little curiosity about the marketplace. In comparison, U.S. News asks companies – the consumers of MBA talent – to rate the hires from the business schools where they recruit. Fair or not, LinkedIn bypasses these critical voices who have first-hand insights on the graduates of top business schools.

More than that, LinkedIn’s underlying premise is that the best MBA programs yield the best professional results. Question is, shouldn’t they leave space for experience – also known as student satisfaction. In The Economist’s now-defunct MBA ranking, students and alumni were surveyed on their satisfaction with areas like Career Services, Classmates, Facilities, Faculty, and Programming. The Financial Times still surveys alumni respondents on their schools’ Alumni Network, Career Services, and Overall Satisfaction with the program. In other words, LinkedIn may measure career progress, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect with how happy graduates were with their overall business school experience (or professional satisfaction for that matter).

Tuck Hall in the Winter

A PROMISING RANKING POISED FOR A SECOND-YEAR LEAP

Alas, some of these shortcomings may stem from the more narrow scope of LinkedIn’s ambitions. Unlike more grandiose MBA rankings, LinkedIn’s objective is more a reinterpretation of the languishing Forbes MBA ranking, which evaluated programs based on pre- and post-graduation earnings. In LinkedIn’s case, they are leveraged their data warehouse to answer a key question: Which MBA programs best set up their alumni for long-term career success?. It was a question rooted in LinkedIn’s own research, which found, for example, that “MBA grads from the class of 2012 were 139% more likely to secure a VP-level role within 10 years of graduation than those with a bachelor’s alone.” Knowing that nearly three-quarters of MBA candidates were seeking higher incomes to offset tuition and costs, LinkedIn developed their methodology.

“It became clear that applicants to business school are mostly motivated by a potential pathway to better, more interesting work,” explains Taylor Borden, Editor at LinkedIn News, in a LinkedIn piece. “From there, we were able to compile a list of universally important factors. The goal was to focus on career outcomes — looking at post-MBA success — rather than traditional prestige markers like acceptance rates or test scores. These outcomes boiled down to: job opportunities, the ability to progress in one’s career, network strength, leadership potential and a diverse learning environment.”

Did LinkedIn hit the mark with their first foray into the MBA ranking landscape? To borrow a popular phrase in business school campuses: That depends. For readers viewing an MBA as a pathway to success, the methodology hits the mark. Still, the dearth of concrete pay data – which conveys  far more than simple promotions and titles – undermines LinkedIn’s mission. At the same time, LinkedIn’s lack of transparency – an inability to provide weights to its methodology outcomes and data to illuminate differences in business schools – give the ranking limited sticky value.

Still, the expectations were high, considering LinkedIn’s brand name and wealth of resources. In the end, the ranking could act as a business case: a compelling idea and promising approach ultimately undermined by misreading what truly makes rankings invaluable: clear and accessible data. Still, this was just LinkedIn’s first time, where heavy time and energy were concentrating on finding a purpose and formulating a plan. In sales, it is said that the biggest growth happens between a representative’s rookie and second years. Rankings are no different. LinkedIn learned its lessons in 2023. The first act was promising. Now that LinkedIn has learned the ropes, they may be poised to make a real impact in the coming year.

Page 3: See how the Linkedin Ranking compares to its counterparts at U.S. News and Bloomberg Businessweek.

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