3) USC Marshall: The Shine Has Worn Off

It helps to view USC Marshall like a sports franchise.

Step back to 2019: the Marshall School was run by Dean Jim Ellis. He had held the position for a dozen years and was highly regarded by faculty and students alike. Without warning, he was called into the office of USC’s interim president and terminated under the guise that he hadn’t responded to a series of Office of Equity and Diversity cases – most of which, Ellis claimed, he’d never even seen.

It was a tawdry affair, fueled by what many perceived as an overly ambitious but inept interim looking to position herself for the big chair. Much like the firing of a winning coach, the decision also triggered an outpouring of support for the then-71-year-old Ellis. One Faculty member described him as ““a mentor, a beacon, a great teacher and great leader,” adding that he will be remembered as a “talented development agent, [who] found ways to continue to bring top-flight students, top-dollar donors, and top faculty talent to Marshall.”

The anonymous faculty member concluded with this statement: “James Ellis has been the best dean that the MSB has ever had.”

That’s a high bar to reach. With faculty feeling blindsided and betrayed, USC dipped into the PR handbook popularized by sports teams in flux. The school decided to make a flashy hire to be the face of their franchise. And it would be hard to make a bigger statement than convincing Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett to pick up stakes and relocate to Southern California. Picture the Tampa Bay Buccaneers wooing Tom Brady from the New England Patriots to be their quarterback. Think big donations, elite faculty, cutting-edge programming, prize students, and (of course) higher rankings. Marshall would wipe the slate clean and become a West Coast Ivy, some thought.

Just one problem, Dean Garrett hasn’t turned into Tom Brady. Instead, he resembles Dan Marino – a Hall of Fame dean with a sunny disposition and inimitable traits who has delivered a slew of victories…but no championships.

That’s not to say Dean Garrett hasn’t been a free agent success who has earned every penny. Under his leadership, the school has built the nation’s 2nd-best undergraduate business program according to Poets&Quants. By the same token, Marshall now boasts a Top 10 Online MBA program, which topped out as the 3rd-best in the world a year ago. True to Garrett’s Wharton roots, Marshall has emerged as a Top 10 faculty research juggernaut globally. Since his arrival, Marshall has produced undergraduate and full-time MBA classes that have achieved gender parity. At the same time, he oversaw the core curriculum revamp that deeply embedded data-driven models and mindsets while beefing up the elective catalog to provide more options in popular areas like sustainability and analytics.

With a resume like that, you’d expect Marshall to commission a statue of Dean Garrett outside Brian Kennedy Field. However, there is one area that has bedeviled Garrett: Rankings. Exhibit A: Bloomberg Businessweek. This year, USC Marshall finished 30th, a steep 13-spot drop over the previous year. In fact, the rank places Marshall lower than where it was the year before Dean Garrett arrived (22nd). While Marshall climbed to 14th with Bloomberg Businessweek the year after Garrett arrived, the backslide must be disconcerting deva vu to the inhabitants of Bridge Hall.

69 is the number that stands out. That is where Marshall ranked among its American peers for Learning, a survey covering topics ranging from relevant content to problem-solving development to faculty support. Another number is 35, which is where Marshall ranked for its Network. That said, the latter ranking rounds counter to USC’s reputation for its Trojan Family – a highly-engaged alumni network that is hell-bent on finding internships and jobs for USC students and fellow graduates. It also flies in the face of The Financial Times’ annual survey of students and alumni, where Marshall consistently ranks among the Top 10 for its alumni network.

Mind you, a one-year decline can be dismissed as an aberration. Problem is, you could describe 2024 as Marshall’s ‘terrible, horrible, no good, very bad’ rankings reckoning. With The Financial Times, for example, USC Marshall plummeted from 21st to 33rd. That doesn’t count an 8.721 student satisfaction score (on a 10-point scale) that isn’t factored in the FT’s ranking. In U.S. News, Marshall maintained a Top 20 ranking…but still slipped from 15th to 18th. When CEOWorld surveyed c-suite executives, Marshall came in 41st – down 11 spots from the previous year. Fortune? A four-spot drop to 22nd. LinkedIn was the only major 2024 MBA ranking where Marshall boosted its stature. It rose from 19th to 17th among American programs.

Fact is, USC Marshall lost ground in five of six major MBA rankings in 2024. That’s not a methodology issue – that’s a Marshall issue. To an optimist, these declines might reflect that recent investments have yet to reach fruition. To the pessimist, this performance lays bare that the plan needs revisiting and the execution requires attention. Either way, stakeholders – like sports fans – are an impatient group. When it comes to Dean Garrett, they’re bound to ask the most pressing of questions to any franchise leader: What have you done for us lately?

4) Diversity: A Noble Cause Poorly Done 

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to make illegal race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions, it has become increasingly difficult for admission officers to recruit and enroll minority students. Private universities often have more leeway to use their scholarship funds to entice under-represented minorities to their schools, but most public universities are severely constrained in their ability to craft a racially diverse class of incoming students.

To its credit, Bloomberg Businessweek has tried to give schools incentives to enroll more URM and female MBA students by including diversity as one of five core metrics in its MBA ranking. Half of the diversity score is based on gender, while the other half is based on race. The data used in this year’s ranking is for cohorts that entered their MBA programs in the fall of 2023 just before the Supreme Court’s June 29th decision. So the metric doesn’t reflect the impact of that ruling on diversity in MBA admissions.

In any case, diversity is the least weighted category of the five ranking criteria–worth only 6.6% of an MBA program’s place on the list. Compensation, at 37.7%, is valued at nearly six times the diversity metric. Businessweek doesn’t even bother to measure the diversity of non-U.S. programs because many schools outside the U.S. do not closely track the racial identity of their students.

There are numerous problems with Businessweek‘s methodology that make its diversity measure an awful metric, unfair to both public universities and schools that enroll larger cohorts of MBA students. No less troublesome, it provides incentives to admission officials that can lead to perverse outcomes. It’s no accident that George Washington University’s business school ranks first this year: It entered a cohort of just 65 students, with 65% of the class female or non-binary, 29% black, 16% Hispanic, and 13% Asian. Only 32% are white at a time when 62% of the U.S. population is white. The small size of the school’s MBA class and its status as a private university makes it a lot easier to enroll a diverse class.

And the number two MBA program for diversity, according to Businessweek? It is one of the least diverse business schools in the U.S.: Howard University. Businessweek‘s methodology awards schools NOT for diversity but for enrolling URM students and women. Howard, which enrolled a class of only 23 MBA students fails to even rank among the 75 U.S. schools this year. It has no white or Asian students in its cohort, no Native Americans, and no Pacific Islanders. Some 92% of the students are black, with the remaining 8% identifying as Hispanic. Women make up 54% of the MBA students. Surely, a school that enrolls no white or Asian students can hardly be thought of as diverse.

Based on Businessweek‘s narrow definition of diversity, a school gets no credit for international students, first-generation college students, or industry and educational backgrounds–all metrics of a truly diverse class that are as important if not more important than what Businessweek measures.

And then there is a head-scratching formula Businessweek applies to URM students. The methodology blatantly discriminates against Asian Americans. In fact, schools get five times the credit for enrolling a black student over an Asian American and nearly six times the credit over a Hispanic. And if a school really wanted to game the ranking, all it has to do is spend more time in Alaska recruiting students. Every enrolled Alaskan native in the U.S. MBA program is worth nearly ten times an Asian American and twice as much as a black student.

That’s because Businessweek applies a “multiplier” on each of these racial categories (see table below) to account for the “GMAT pipeline” even though well over a third of MBA students are now admitted with a GRE score. The multiplier is used to adjust a school’s minority group population based on that group’s presence in the GMAT test-taking population relative to the U.S. population. This numerical witchcraft makes it harder to decode the ranking’s legitimacy and is yet another less transparent aspect of the methodology. Deploying such a formulate on GMAT test takers is also hardly relevant at a time when so many of the ranked MBA programs are test-optional or generous in granting standardized test waivers.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Racial Multiplier

So the takeaway here for MBA administrators is simple? Do not take this metric seriously. You can lump it into that George Bush category of voodoo economics. Or you can do something that may well be more ridiculous. Have your admissions team make recent trips to Alaska and award Alaska Natives, particularly female ones, full-ride scholarships. It’s a sure way to game this oddball metric.

TOP 25 FOR DIVERSITY ACCORDING TO BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

Diversity Rank & School	Index Score	Women	Black	Hispanic	Asian
1. George Washington	94.6	65%	29%	16%	13%
2. Howard University	94.5	54%	92%	8%	0%
3. Morgan State (Graves)	87.5	44%	75%	17%	0%
4. Pennsylvania (Wharton)	82.6	50%	14%	9%	31
5. Baruch (Zicklin)	82.5	42%	24%	24%	12%
5. Rochester (Simon)	82.5	47%	16%	16%	26
7. Northeastern (D’Amore-McKim)	82.0	56%	15%	4%	19%
8. San Diego (Knauss)	80.9	45%	3%	22%	6%
9. Southern Methodist (Cox)	80.6	48%	18%	8%	4%
9. Syracuse (Whitman)	80.6	42%	13%	13%	0%
11. Cornell (Johnson)	80.4	44%	15%	15%	26%
11. Hult International	80.4	45%	14%	14%	14%
13. SUNY at Buffalo	80.2	51%	14%	8%	11%
13. Washington (Foster)	80.2	47%	12%	12%	31%
15. Boston University (Questrom)	80.1%	39%	6%	17%	31%
16. MIT (Sloan)	79.9	46%	11%	16%	26%
17. Stanford	78.6	46%	8%	12%	24%
18. Harvard	77.9	45%	10%	11%	22%
19. Duke (Fuqua)	77.7	45%	14%	13%	14%
20. Tulane (Freeman)	77.7	44%	4%	22%	0%
21. Northwestern (Kellogg)	77.6	48%	8%	10%	24%
22. Rochester Tech (Saunders)	77.3	49%	7%	6%	5%
22. Tampa (Sykes)	77.3	44%	2%	17%	1%
24. Rutgers	77.0	42%	6%	19%	38%
25. Washington (Olin)	76.0	37%	15%	20%	12%