Drone flight around the Terry College of Business Business Learning Community on Friday, July 15, 2022 in Athens, GA.

9) A Tale of Two Rankings Favorites: William & Mary and Georgia Terry

Every ranking finds a school that unexpectedly fits with its priorities. For years, U.S. News & World Report had pegged the University of Texas at Dallas’ Jindal School as a Top 40 school long before it made the radar of other outlets. SDA Bocconi spent a decade slowly climbing The Financial Times ranking before it reached the top spot in Bloomberg Businessweek’s European ranking last year. This year, LinkedIn listed the Indian School of Business as the #6 MBA program in the world – ahead of Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg, and London Business School, no less.

The University of Georgia’s Terry College is another school whose ascension has been a clandestine affair. The Financial Times ranked it 40th this year, after finishing 61st and 80th the previous two years. Notably, Terry produced the ranking’s highest Value for Money score, along with placing 14th for Career Services. In U.S. News, Terry creeped up to 27th after finishing 38th just two years earlier. You’ll even find Terry popping up on the LinkedIn and Fortune rankings this year. That’s not bad for a program that is overshadowed by two Top 25 MBA programs in the same state: Emory Goizueta and Georgia Tech Scheller.

Naturally, you’d expect Terry to make an impression on Bloomberg Businessweek.

Think again.

This year, Terry scraped together a 35th-place finish. No shame in that – except that it represents an 8-spot drop over the previous year (though Terry ranked 50th in 2021). Learning is Terry’s strength; the school ranks 15th in this dimension, delivering an academic experience superior to MIT Sloan and four Ivy League programs. The downfall: Compensation – where Terry ranks 35th.

In reality, Bloomberg Businessweek has eyes for a different undervalued program: The College of William & Mary’s Mason School. Mason ranks 32nd this year, up four spots from last year (and up 26 spots from 2021). That’s quite a difference from The Financial Times (76th), LinkedIn (Unranked), and Fortune (52nd) – though Mason did reach 40th with U.S. News this spring.

In Virginia, the Darden School is regarded as the ultimate MBA learning experience, anchored by rock star teachers and case study immersion. Ironically, according to student surveys conducted by Bloomberg Businessweek, Mason garners the highest scores among American programs for Learning. An anomaly? Guess again. According to a similar student survey conducted by The Princeton Review in 2024, Mason notched the 5th-highest scores for Faculty Quality. Back to Bloomberg Businessweek, Mason also achieved two more top 10 finishes: Entrepreneurship (8th) and Networking (9th). Sadly, quality doesn’t yield quantity for Mason grads. The school ranks 45th for Compensation – a dimension based on a near equal mix of survey questions and alumni pay data.

In the end, Terry and Mason are borderline Top 30 programs at this point. However, each brings something unique to the table. Terry is the ultimate low-cost and high-return program with a small class size and high personal touch that is unique among public programs. Being 75 miles from Atlanta is another advantage for Terry. In Mason’s case, you can expect academic excellence and an engaged alumni base according to survey-takers. In Williamsburg, you can get away from all the crowds, noise, and traffic – but not too far. After all, DC is just 2.5 hours away…and you can make Norfolk in under an hour.

Either way, MBAs can’t lose with Terry or Mason. Both are up-and-comers whose MBA degrees will only increase in value over time. Along the way, they’re bound to knock a few more programs down a notch in the rankings.

10) Bloomberg Businessweek’s Transparency Problem

Businessweek uses an astonishing 2,184 words to explain how it ranks full-time MBA programs this year. If you had the fortitude to read through its description of the methodology, however, you would be left scratching your head. How can anyone spend well over 2,000 words and be less than transparent?

Somehow, Bloomberg Businessweek does it. Transparency is important to a ranking. Readers need to know exactly what goes into a school’s rank, and schools need to be able to reverse engineer their rankings to gain the assurance that it is accurate. Good luck to any academic who tries to replicate this ranking.

It’s not that you won’t learn a lot by reading through the methodology. One thing it makes clear is that a lot of thought was put into the creation of the list by the magazine’s editors. Yet, it is still wanting.

Consider how Businessweek‘s describes how it calculates a school’s score for networking, one of five criteria in the ranking for U.S. business schools. “This index gauges the quality of networks cultivated by classmates; students’ interactions with alumni; effectiveness of the career services office; quality and breadth of alumni-to-alumni interactions; and the school’s brand power, according to recruiters.”

That’s it. We have no idea of the exact questions being asked of alumni, students or recruiters. We are not told how these different attributes are measured by Businessweek nor what weight each might carry in the index score. It’s a black box.

The same is true for its “entrepreneurship” category. “Students and alumni tell us whether their school took entrepreneurship as seriously as other career paths and rate the quality of training they received to start a small business or startup. Recruiters rate schools according to whether graduates show exceptional entrepreneurial skills and drive.”

With the help of the business schools, the magazine notes that it surveyed 5,292 students, 9,222 alumni, and 734 employers for this ranking. But contrary to journalistic standards, it does not reveal the actual responses rate for each of these surveys. Instead, it reports elsewhere that it received 7,474 responses from students and alumni from three graduating classes in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

It was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who famously noted that “sunlight is the best of disinfectants.”

Bloomberg Businessweek needs a lot more sunlight.