In The Rankings Game, B-Schools Can ‘Lose by Gaining’ & ‘Gain by Losing,' Study Finds

A new study out of Oxford finds that skipping a ranking can help a B-school as much as topping one, because the right combination is what counts

For as long as rankings have existed, most business schools have treated them like a decathlon where every event counts equally and skipping one costs you the whole competition. A new study out of Oxford’s Saïd Business School says that’s the wrong way to think about it.

Chris Moos, a lecturer in organization studies at Saïd, has a paper accepted at the Academy of Management Learning & Education that pulls apart 13 different evaluations – seven MBA program rankings, three accreditations, and three institutional rankings – to ask a deceptively simple question: which combinations of performing and not performing in these evaluations actually move the needle with prospective students?

In his paper titled “Turning the League Tables: Configurations of Evaluations and MBA Student Interest,” Moos’s central metaphor is that the whole ranking scramble is “like a decathlon.” Decathletes don’t win by topping every event – they win by stacking up a combination of results that’s good enough across the board. Moos argues business schools have been playing the wrong sport, training for ten golds when a bronze-and-silver mix would do just fine.

His answer: there are several ways to win, several schools are already doing it without realizing it, and opting out of some rankings entirely can work just fine.

WHEN PERFORMING WELL BACKFIRES

The paper’s sharpest finding cuts against nearly everything schools assume about evaluations. The standard playbook treats a ranking appearance as a straightforward win and an absence as a straightforward loss. Moos’s data says that logic breaks down constantly.

In several of the configurations tied to less student interest, schools were performing well – strong institutional-ranking positions, solid accreditation records – and still losing ground. Meanwhile, in several configurations tied to more interest, schools were sitting out major program rankings altogether – Businessweek, Forbes, U.S. News, sometimes three at once – and still coming out ahead. Programs skipped as many as three rankings and still landed in a winning configuration, so long as something else in their profile was strong enough to carry it.

Moos leans on existing research on stakeholder scrutiny to explain the mechanism. Standing out in a ranking invites comparison, and comparison can cut both ways: prior work on “the paradox of publicity” has shown that awards and recognitions can trigger closer scrutiny and less favorable evaluation, not more. A ranking appearance can function less like a badge of honor and more like a spotlight a school didn’t necessarily want. On the flip side, staying out of the spotlight – not appearing in a ranking, or holding back from an accreditation body – can let a school’s imperfections stay unexamined, which research on strategic ambiguity suggests is sometimes exactly what a lower-status program needs.

LOSE BY GAINING, GAIN BY LOSING

This is where the paper’s title framing comes from most directly: schools have long worried about “losing by gaining,” where chasing a ranking exposes them to the very scrutiny they were trying to avoid. Moos’s data adds the mirror case – “gaining by losing,” where a school’s absence from a ranking is read by prospective students as neutral or even irrelevant, provided the rest of its profile is doing enough work. Accreditation is the clearest case of this backfiring in his sample: schools that leaned entirely on accreditation status, with no program-ranking presence at all, saw less interest, not more, even though accreditation is the credential business schools have spent a century treating as unimpeachable.

“While my findings challenge the dominant view that business schools’ performance in evaluations always brings approval from external stakeholders, they align with recent insights from social evaluations research,” Moos writes. “For example, performance in evaluations has been found to trigger stakeholder scrutiny and as a result become a ‘burden’ for universities. Evaluation performances may draw in larger and more demanding stakeholder groups, which can lead to negative comparisons, and hence negative assessments.”

On the other hand, he writes, in some cases “nonperformance attracted more student interest,” such as when programs’ “nonperformance in the Businessweek, Forbes, U.S. News, Financial Times, and Economist rankings still attracted more interest when programs performed in other evaluations.” He adds that his results “suggest that schools may also effectively ‘gain by losing’ – specifically, attract interest when performing in some but not other evaluations. This finding is particularly relevant because, aside from a few resource-rich schools, performing in all evaluations is not possible for most business schools around the globe. As the sample, and therefore the configurations I found, covered both higher- and lower-status schools, my results also provide important qualification to widespread suggestions that only high-status schools can choose not
to perform in rankings.”

THE DATA BEHIND THE DECATHLON

Moos got his hands on an unpublished Graduate Management Admission Council dataset tracking GMAT scores sent to full-time MBA programs worldwide. He used the number of scores a program received as a stand-in for prospective student interest – a reasonable proxy given that sending a score costs real money, and sending extras costs more.

The 13 evaluations break down like this:

MBA program rankings

Bloomberg Businessweek (U.S.)
Bloomberg Businessweek (international)
Forbes (U.S.)
Forbes (international)
U.S. News & World Report
Financial Times
The Economist

Accreditations

AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business)
AMBA (Association of MBAs)
EQUIS (EFMD Quality Improvement System)

Institutional rankings

ARWU (Academic Ranking of World Universities, or the “Shanghai Ranking”)
THE (Times Higher Education World University Rankings)
QS (Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings)

After narrowing a pool of more than 6,600 program-years down to schools that required the GMAT and had complete data across tuition, rankings, and accreditation status, Moos landed on 144 program-years from 64 schools between 2014 and 2018, spanning the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

Rather than running a regression that treats each ranking as an independent variable, he used fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, a method that looks at how conditions combine rather than what each one contributes on its own. It’s the same logic that governs a decathlon: nobody expects a single athlete to win every event, but the right combination of results is enough to take the gold.

FIVE WAYS TO WIN, ONE WAY TO LOSE

Moos identified six configurations of evaluation performance that reliably predicted student interest – five associated with more interest, one with less – and grouped them into three broader patterns.

Schools with an extensive pattern performed fairly well across a wide range of evaluations. Think IMD and London Business School, which typically ranked in the top 10 of Businessweek and Forbes‘ international lists and held double or triple accreditation, or HKUST and Mannheim, which added strong institutional-ranking performance to the mix.

Schools with a discerning pattern performed just as well, but in far fewer places. University College Dublin’s Smurfit school and the University of Hong Kong’s business school, for instance, skipped Businessweek, Forbes, and U.S. News entirely, but still pulled solid Financial Times and Economist rankings, plus institutional-ranking strength, and that combination proved just as effective at attracting interest as the extensive approach. Imperial College Business School and McGill’s Desautels School landed in a similar bucket by leaning on Businessweek, Financial Times, and top-100 institutional rankings while skipping U.S. News, Forbes, and The Economist altogether.

The losing pattern was single-type performance: schools that skipped every MBA program ranking but leaned entirely on accreditation or institutional prestige. The University of Illinois Chicago’s Liautaud School and Aarhus University fit this bucket by holding accreditation but no program ranking presence, while Trinity Business School in Dublin and Hebrew University’s business school leaned on institutional rankings alone. Both versions of this pattern were consistently linked to less interest, even when the institutional rankings involved were genuinely strong.

TWO MOVES FOR SCHOOL LEADERS

Moos closes the paper with two provisional strategies for deans trying to navigate the crowded evaluations landscape. The first is to foster “evaluation diversity”: Every new ranking or accreditation that enters the field doubles the number of possible configurations a school can use to attract interest, which dilutes the power any single list holds over the conversation. Moos points to the rise of diversity and sustainability-focused rankings, along with AI-driven upstarts like LinkedIn’s MBA ranking, as evidence this is already happening – and suggests schools could actively support or even help create more of these evaluations rather than just chasing the legacy ones.

The second is to use configurations strategically. Rather than trying to check every box, school leaders can map where they currently stand across the 13 evaluations, compare that against the configurations Moos identifies as working, and deliberately trade off weaker performance in one ranking for stronger performance elsewhere. His data shows that skipping one or even three program rankings was compatible with strong student interest, so long as it was paired with real strength somewhere else.

Read Chris Moos’ paper, “Turning the League Tables: Configurations of Evaluations and MBA Student Interest“, here.

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