How Business Schools Fuel Our Addiction To Rankings

College rankings have reached gale-force proportions. In the past month alone, MBA programs have been ranked by both LinkedIn and Fortune. The Financial Times has ranked Master’s in Management options. The Wall Street Journal and Forbes have also published their college lists. Soon to come, on Oct.  17th will be Bloomberg Businessweek‘s annual MBA ranking.

Understandably, some business schools are getting more selective in deciding which lists to cooperate with and which to ignore. Most U.S. business schools, for example, choose not to cooperate with the FT‘s MiM ranking. Several schools have walked from Fortune‘s MBA ranking.

As much as business school deans loathe the rankings game, the vast majority of them are more than willing participants. The reason is simple: Higher rankings bring more applicants and students to programs. They please alumni enough to open their pockets for more generous donations. They even help on some level to recruit faculty, especially foreign-born professors who put more stock in rankings than they deserve. No less crucial, nearly every dean is assessed by his or her rankings performance.

Over the years, survey after survey has proven the influence that rankings have on prospective students in particular. One survey by the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants found that MBA program rankings, a proxy for reputation, remained the most influential factor in school selection. Some 74% cited rankings as critical to their school choice, compared to 48% who cited the impact on their careers, 46% city/geographic location, and 38% school culture. Some 30% of the respondents considered the net cost (program cost/availability of scholarships) when evaluating specific schools.

EXPLAINING OUR ADDICTION TO RANKINGS

More than clickbait, more than the public’s obsession over who is first and who is tenth, however, schools have no one to blame except themselves for what can best be described as a rankings addiction.  Many schools boast website pages that catalog their best rankings. When ranks go up, the improvements are trumpeted on social media postings. Deans can even write letters to students, alumni, and donors. Every mention of a ranking gives the whole game greater credibility and authority. And by the way, Poets&Quants, which extensively covers most rankings, is as much to blame as anyone for the obsession.

The marketing of a ranking is most explicit in the aftermath of any ranking, no matter how mindlessly flawed, intellectually dishonest, or misleading a ranking might be. Too many schools carelessly misuse rankings to promote their programs rather than leverage successful alumni who can speak to the transformation they experienced.

Facebook and LinkedIn feeds are filled with such nonsense. Just look at the most recent postings in the wake of the FT and Fortune rankings, both severely flawed lists based on suspect methodologies (see examples on this page). Frankly, we are our own worst enemies.

FEW SCHOOLS ARE NOT TEMPTED TO PROMOTE THEIR FAVORABLE RANKINGS

And very few schools are immune from the temptation to unwittingly give these lists more credibility than they deserve. London Business School, one of the premier business institutions in Europe, didn’t miss the opportunity to let prospective students know about its recent ranking from the Financial Times which ranked its Master in Management program sixth best.

Yet, none of these lists meet the four criteria for validity once articulated by Robert Bruner, the former dean of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. His criteria? Objectivity and transparency, representativeness, validity, and significance.

“Very few of the B-school rankings are replicable by outsiders,” he wrote. “Many of the rankings rely on arbitrary scoring of the schools on various criteria. And pity the poor school that fills in the questionnaire incorrectly or incompletely—in the history of school ratings, some of the raters have simply made up the data rather than collect accurate data from respondents…Virtually none of the B-school rankings warrant that the samples on which their surveys are based are representative of the larger population of alums, recruiters, or deans on whom they draw. What do the rankings measure? Is what they measure of any interest to those who care about excellence in management education? Do the rankings truly measure quality? Quality of what? Ideally, the rankings would measure the quality of the learning experience. None of the B-school rankings publish measures of variation on the underlying data, such as the standard deviation. In the absence of such statistics, it is impossible to tell whether the differences among the ranking categories are significant. For instance, is being ranked #16 significantly different from being ranked #10, or #1? We simply don’t know.”

SHOULD SCHOOLS WORK HARDER TO ESTABLISH DIFFERENTIATION?

The public’s hunger for these lists is a function of the lack of full transparency by admission and career management staff as much as the failure of schools to create smart differentiation in a business education market that has become commoditized with similar offerings. In a recent paper, a European professor observed that schools need to rebuild their legitimacy by focusing more clearly on one of three areas: research, teaching, or social relevance. “Most business schools fail to prioritize one of these three domains. Instead, they spread their efforts thinly and end up with mediocre performance in all three domains,” says Bodo B. Schlegelmilch, professor emeritus for global marketing strategy at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Don’t expect our fascination with rankings to fade–not as long as the public clicks on these lists and wants to read them.