6) The Rising Stars

The South. The Midwest. The West.

This year’s biggest movers came in all forms. A private academic juggernaut. Two schools better known for football than finance. An emerging powerhouse situated in an underrated startup and tech hub.

Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management

University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business

Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business

University of Utah’s Eccles School of Business

Call them upstarts, up-and-comers, and rising stars. Vanderbilt Owen climbed 7 spots to rank 20th – after spending the past five years bouncing from 23rd to 29th. Georgia Terry continued its impressive march, rising from 39th to 31st over the past four years. The Fisher College vaulted 14 spots in the past year alone to place 30th. By the same token, Utah Eccles raced up 10 spots, going from 48th to 38th – and that’s after ranking 64th just two years ago.

Can these schools build off this year’s momentum and continue their advance up the U.S. News ranking? Let’s just say U.S. News’ ranking isn’t the only instrument detecting major progress. In the 2024 Financial Times MBA Ranking, Georgia Terry surged from 80th to 40th in the past year. At the same time, Vanderbilt Owen cracked the Top 25 in the 2023 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking, While Ohio State Fisher no longer participates in the Financial Times ranking, it had moved from 72nd to 33rd during the 2020-2022 span.

Mean starting pay and bonus accounts for 20% of the ranking weight. Here, the Fisher College made huge strides, as pay rose from $125,479 to $158,381. The same could be said for Vanderbilt Owen ($170,222 to $184,712) and Georgia Terry ($141,505 to $149,355). In fact, Owen’s starting pay is higher than the six programs ranked above it. Pay wasn’t the only output driving higher rankings. The Fisher College’s graduation placement inched up from 77.6% to 83.7% over the past year, a measure worth a 7% weight. Georgia Terry’s 97.7% placement rate within three months of graduation – a 13% weight – is higher than any other program ranked above it.

The inputs also grab attention. Utah Eccles’s median GMAT score hiked from 625 to 650 in the past year, with undergraduate GPA (3.34 to 3.57) following suit. In addition, the school’s median Verbal GRE score – 162 – is equal to the number reported by Chicago Booth, Berkeley Haas, and Columbia Business School. In fact, only 7 MBA programs boasted higher GRE Verbal scores than Eccles students. While acceptance rates only constitute a 2% weight, Eccles’s rate fell from 61.6% to 51.97%.

Alas, Eccles wasn’t the only program excelling in inputs. Ohio State Fisher’s undergraduate GPA average climbed from 3.38 to 3.63 over the past year, with Vanderbilt Owen and Georgia Terry making similar strides (3.28 to 3.50 and 3.55 to 3.65 respectively). Fisher also remains one of the most difficult programs to gain entry. It’s acceptance rate dropped from 15.1% to 12.6% — all while its median GMAT rose from 670 to 690. Fun fact: it is technically more difficult to earn a spot at Fisher than Harvard

When it comes to respect, Utah Eccles punches wells above its weight. In the U.S. News employer survey, Eccles pulled a 4.1 average on a 5-point scale from recruiters – a score that’s equal to Ivy Leaguers Dartmouth Tuck and Cornell Johnson.  It is also a .2 of a point improvement over the previous year.

Yes, this fearsome foursome is ready and able to make a bigger impact on the business school landscape. Should be interesting if next year’s rankings show whether they retrench, retreat – or raid a few more spots.

7) Rankings May Stink But U.S. News & The Financial Times Are Becoming More Important. Here’s why

Just as U.S. News released its newest ranking, the folks at Kaplan and Manhattan Prep also published two polls on rankings of MBA candidates and B-school admission officials. The verdict? Rankings stink.

Business school candidates increasingly have a jaundiced view of them, believing that rankings have lost prestige in recent years, even as they can’t pry their eyes from the lists. Fully half of the B-school admissions officers who responded to a separate poll also agreed that rankings have lost their shine: As one admissions officer put it, “They are a joke and are simply ways to generate revenue for ranking publications. Many schools attempt to game them.”

Putting justifiable scorn aside, here’s what both of these business school stakeholders are missing. The field of legitimate rankings, if you want to call any of these lists legitimate, is shrinking fast. The Economist walked away from ranking business schools. So did Forbes magazine and, more recently, Fortune, after a disastrous clickbait effort. The first MBA ranking in 1988, still published by Bloomberg Businessweek, is a mere shadow of itself, its impact abated by serious academic critique. What that means is simple: The power and influence particularly exercised by U.S. News and the Financial Times has not diminished. If anything, the remaining lists have become more dominant and influential.

That’s because there are fewer competing rankings in the market to dilute their impact. More is, in fact, less when it comes to rankings. The more lists that get published, especially by major media brands such as The Economist and Forbes, crowds out the individual impact of any one player. So those who remain achieve greater authority and command more, not less, attention.

For business schools, more has been merrier when it comes to rankings. Fewer lists also mean that schools have fewer places to do well, and fewer places to pick and choose what to promote in news releases and websites.

8) U.S. News: Moving The Goalposts Again Without Notice

If you’re a dean trying to make sense of the U.S. News ranking in the past two years, you can be forgiven for scratching your head in giving up. In each of the past two iterations of the ranking, U.S. News has pushed through fairly significant changes in their methodology–some obvious, some less so.

As one exasperated dean tells Poets&Quants: “It’s perplexing thing that they change the formula every year without any communication. They should at least notify schools because this ranking has such an impact. Everyone is running around right now analyzing the new rules.”

In this new ranking, U.S. News added a new metric that assesses post-MBA salaries by profession. It’s a consequential change because the new metric now makes up 10% of the ranking. To find those percentage points, U.S. News decreased its emphasis on placement at graduation by three points to 7%. The weight it places on jobs three months after commencement was knocked down by seven percentage points to 13%. The upshot: The new ranking places more emphasis on salaries relative to employment in its formula for measuring outcomes.

But that’s not all. The reported placement rates are now calculated as an average over the past two years, rather than the latest year, to smooth out year-over-year variations. In some cases, this can have a big impact. One case in point: At American University’s Kogod School of Business, 90% of the MBA Class of 2023 had jobs three months after graduating, versus 62% a year-earlier. The reported placement rate for Kogod by U.S. News this year? 78.6%.

And these changes are on top of a major upheaval for the 2023 ranking. Last year, U.S. News changed the weighing on all eight metrics it uses to rank MBA programs as well as some of the subjective judgments it employs to calculate those metrics. Fully half of the 2023 ranking was based on job placement and starting salaries with sign-on bonuses. Placement accounted for 30% of the ranking, up from 21%, while the weight on starting pay was pushed up to 20% from 14%.

U.S. News also increased the importance it places on undergraduate GPAs and acceptance rates, while putting slightly less emphasis on standardized test scores.  These adjustments were much less significant, with GMAT and GRE scores getting a 13.0% weight, down from 16.25%, for example. More influential in the ranking was its new rules for calculating average GPAs which now account for 10% of the ranking, up from 7.5%. U.S. News decided to only count GPAs reported on a 4.0 scale so most international students are not in the calculation. That change severely impacted U.S. schools with larger international student bodies.

The ranking organization also put less focus on both its recruiter and peer assessment surveys. By reducing the weight of its survey of deans and senior faculty by half to 12.5% from 25%. U.S. News diminished one anchor of stability in its ranking. The same can be said of the corporate recruiter results which declined in importance to 12.5% from 15%.

The lesson: Whatever you do, don’t try to run a business school on these metrics.