The Rankings Kings Are Retiring. It’s Time to Ask What Rankings Are Really For.

As the architects of MBA rankings step aside, their once-useful system now distorts incentives, misrepresents outcomes, and fails to reflect how today’s students actually define value, write Karthik Kannan, Dilip Chhajed and Pamela Jorden

Two eras are ending at nearly the same moment. Robert Morse, the architect of the U.S. News & World Report business school rankings, retired in July 2025 after four decades of reshaping American higher education. John Byrne, who designed the BusinessWeek MBA rankings and later founded Poets&Quants, is stepping away in April 2026. Together, these two men built the machinery that now governs how business schools recruit, spend, and define success.

Their departure is a moment to ask: Are the rankings they built still solving the right problem?

We believe the answer is no.

THE ORIGINAL BARGAIN – AND ITS BROKEN ECONOMICS

Morse and Byrne started with a genuinely good idea. The MBA is what economists call an “experience good” — a product whose quality you cannot evaluate until after you’ve consumed it. Prospective students faced a real information problem: How do you compare Georgetown to Purdue to Arizona when you can’t see inside those programs? Rankings distilled messy, asymmetric information into a single legible number. That was genuinely useful.

The rankings became enormously powerful — too powerful, in our view, for their own good. John Byrne, in a recent conversation, put it plainly: if U.S. News stopped ranking business schools tomorrow, many programs would shutter their flagship two-year MBA offering. That is a remarkable statement. It reveals not just the influence of rankings, but the degree to which they have hollowed out the independent judgment of the institutions they were meant to serve. Rankings that began as a consumer information tool have become the operating system for an entire industry.

Consider where that operating system directs traffic. Salary accounts for a dominant share of every major ranking methodology, and the highest-paid post-MBA roles cluster in a narrow corridor: elite consulting firms, Wall Street banks, and large coastal technology companies. The incentive is clear. At leading programs, high-end consulting alone absorbs 30 to 44 percent of each graduating class, and finance claims another 20 to 35 percent. At schools like Kellogg and Darden, over two-thirds of graduates funnel into just two industries. The entire infrastructure of full-time MBA education — the recruiting pipelines, the summer internship conversion model, the salary figures that move ranking needles — is engineered around companies like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and a shrinking roster of tech giants. Yet a landmark 2024 analysis of more than 4,200 MBA graduates found that only 13 percent landed at the top ten post-MBA employers. Schools are pricing, positioning, and optimizing for an outcome the vast majority of their students will never achieve.

This distortion has real financial consequences. A two-year program at a top school costs $150,000 or more in tuition. Add two years of foregone salary for a professional in their late twenties, and the total investment can approach $350,000 before interest. The salary premium once made that trade obvious; it no longer does for the majority of graduates. Many students have drawn their own conclusions and shifted toward evening, weekend, and part-time formats. But because rankings reward full-time enrollment, many schools respond by artificially subsidizing full-time tuition to sustain their ranked cohorts — a decision that damages the economics of the very programs the rankings are supposed to celebrate. Business school deans describe feeling trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma: exit the full-time market and fall in the rankings; stay and keep subsidizing. So everyone plays on.

Rankings have not only become the tail wagging the dog — they have drifted far from the original mission they were built to serve.

THE STUDENTS HAVE ALREADY DECIDED

Gen Z has different priorities and reached different conclusions than prior generations. Deloitte’s 2024 Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey, covering nearly 23,000 respondents across 44 countries, found that work-life balance is now the top consideration when Gen Z chooses an employer, ranking above salary, career advancement, and company prestige. Randstad’s 2025 Workmonitor confirmed the shift: for the first time in the survey’s 22-year history, work-life balance surpassed pay as the leading motivator across all age groups, with 76 percent of Gen Z respondents prioritizing balance over compensation.

This generation thinks in real dollars, not nominal ones — and current ranking methodologies do not reflect that. According to BEA Regional Price Parity data, prices in San Francisco run about 18 percent above the national average, Phoenix runs about 6 percent above average, and Indianapolis runs about 5 percent below. A $200,000 salary therefore, carries a real purchasing power gap of more than $40,000 between San Francisco and Indianapolis. No current ranking captures that difference, which means students relying on salary figures alone are making consequential decisions with incomplete information.

According to GMAC, 64 percent of full-time one-year MBA programs indicated a surge in applications in the 2024–25 cycle. The generation is voting with its feet. Yet this fast-growing market suffers from the same information asymmetry problem that Morse and Byrne originally set out to solve — it just has no ranking infrastructure designed to address it.

BETTER MEASUREMENT FOR A DIFFERENT PRODUCT

Ranking agencies have combined two-year and one-year MBA programs into a single methodology, as if they were the same product serving the same student. They are not. Folding them together ignores a fundamental difference in what each program is designed to do — and creates exactly the apples-to-oranges confusion that rankings were invented to eliminate. The answer is not to abandon existing rankings. There is still a substantial population of students who value the two-year model and the career transformation it offers; that ranking serves them well and should be preserved. What is needed alongside it is a dedicated ranking for one-year programs, built around the metrics that actually reflect their value proposition.

One-year programs attract students seeking focused execution. They do not define success as whether graduates land at McKinsey three months after commencement. Forcing them to compete on two-year metrics systematically underrates programs that are, by design, doing something different and doing it well.

The centerpiece of such a ranking should be purchasing-power-adjusted salaries. The BEA calculates Regional Price Parities using Consumer Price Index data combined with American Community Survey rent information, covering housing, food, transportation, healthcare, education, and other consumption categories. The data are published annually for every metropolitan statistical area in the country. The math is simple: divide the nominal salary by the regional price parity for that metro. No new data collection is required; no subjective judgments are introduced. Rankings could implement this adjustment immediately. Complementary metrics could include career velocity — promotions and scope of responsibility within three to five years — and outcome-alignment scores measuring whether graduates achieved their stated career goals. Regional rankings, sometimes proposed as a compromise, miss the point entirely: Gen Z does not want to be told their career choices are inherently second-tier. They want national recognition that diverse paths represent equally valid forms of success.

A LEGACY WORTH BUILDING ON

The best tribute to Morse and Byrne is not to preserve the machinery they built in its original form, but to ask honestly whether it is still doing what they intended. They understood that information markets fail without trusted intermediaries, and they spent careers trying to be that intermediary. That instinct was right. What needs updating is the information itself — what we measure, for whom, and why.

The market opportunity is real, the methodology is sound, and the data already exists. The ranking organization that moves first on a dedicated one-year framework will likely own this category as it grows. More importantly, it will be doing what Morse and Byrne set out to do in the first place: giving students the information they need to make one of the most consequential decisions of their lives. That would be a legacy worth building.

Karthik Kannan is Dean of the Eller College of Management at Arizona University. Dilip Chhajed is Associate Dean for Master’s and Online Programs  and as the Executive Director of the BS in Integrated Business and Engineering program at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue University. Pamela Jorden is Assistant Dean of Graduate Programs at the Eller College.

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