Oxford Study: Maximizing Ranking Performance May Be A Losing Strategy For Business Schools

In 2017, the French chef Sébastien Bras did something unthinkable: he asked Michelin to take back his three stars. Every plate served in his restaurant Le Suquet might be judged by a Michelin inspector, he said. After 18 years at the summit, he just wanted to cook “with a free spirit and without stress.” Michelin reluctantly acquiesced to his request, a first in its illustrious history. A year later, it put Le Suquet back in the guide with two stars, entirely unbidden. Bras shrugged, kept cooking, and holds those two stars to this day. His restaurant remains full, quite unaffected by its missing third star.

University leaders must look at Bras with envy. Every time the league tables land, they are inundated by calls from concerned alumni, irate governing bodies and anxious marketing teams. This well-worn routine rests on an untested assumption: that performance in every ranking is so essential, even existential, that those who do not perform are less worthy. It is an assumption that runs right through higher education — from institutional league tables to subject rankings to the lists that decide which journals “count”, as the recent controversy over the Financial Times‘ revision of its FT50 journal list has reminded the sector.

Few university leaders dare follow Bras. But my new research, just published in the Academy of Management Learning & Education, suggests the stakes of any single evaluation may be lower than they fear — and that chasing performance in all evaluations may be misguided, even counterproductive.

THE HIDDEN COST OF PLAYING EVERY GAME

I examined how performance in 13 business school evaluations — from the MBA rankings run by outlets such as the Financial Times to accreditations and global university league tables such as Times Higher Education and QS — combined to attract interest from prospective students, as measured by where they sent their admission test scores. Business schools make an ideal laboratory for a question that concerns the whole academy: they are among the most heavily evaluated institutions on earth. Rather than looking at individual ranking performance in isolation, I asked which combinations of results — a high performance here, a low or no performance there — seemed to attract or repel students.

My two key findings should give pause to anyone who thinks that performing in all evaluations is an inescapable feature of modern higher education. First, institutions can lose out by performing. In some combinations, performance in prestigious university rankings or accreditations actually resulted in less student interest. The spotlight has no loyalty, as Sébastien Bras could tell you. Recognition invites scrutiny, and scrutiny may invite unflattering comparison.

The second finding is more liberating: institutions can gain by not performing in evaluations. Programs that did not perform in as many as three major rankings (including that of U.S. News) still attracted robust interest, provided they did well elsewhere. For instance, Dublin’s Smurfit School and the University of Hong Kong showed no results in several prominent rankings, yet attracted students on the strength of their other outcomes. Nor were gaps in the scorecard a preserve of the elite, as more modest institutions prospered when they were more selective about where they scored. Faced with an array of evaluations, students may be more sophisticated — and forgiving — than the rankings industry assumes.

WHY PROLIFERATION BEATS A SINGLE GATEKEEPER

Rankings may be best understood as a decathlon. Winning every event is an improbable feat; the prize usually goes to the best combination. Yet many institutions really do chase every ranking, pouring money into data submissions, survey campaigns and rankings consultants in pursuit of universal excellence. Most academics and administrators resent the pressure to perform — I once heard a very prominent dean say rankings should be banned altogether. Those on the fence may be glad to know that neglecting rankings may not only be possible, but at times prudent.

There is a hopeful implication here for a sector that feels trapped. Every new evaluation that enters the field — each sustainability ranking, teaching assessment or upstart league table — multiplies the number of viable combinations and dilutes the power of any single gatekeeper. Universities that grumble about the proliferation of rankings may have it backwards. Proliferation is what breaks the monopoly: a world of many imperfect evaluations is one where institutions choose their game; a world with one dominant table is one where the table chooses for them. And when a list-maker unilaterally redraws what counts — as list-makers periodically do — the institutions with diversified evaluation profiles are the ones with somewhere else to stand.

The reality, then, may be more nuanced than the arms race suggests. The critical question for a vice-chancellor or dean may not be “how do we maximize performance everywhere?” but “where can we not perform and still get the same result?” The tennis legend Roger Federer famously quipped that he only ever won 54% of the points he played. Perhaps for the academy too, “good enough” may be the winning strategy.

Which brings us back to Sébastien Bras in his kitchen in France. Eschewing fame in favor of the motto “to live happily, live hidden” might not be for everyone. But he appears to have stumbled on a deeper truth: there is more to academic life than the next performance evaluation.

The writer is a lecturer in organization studies at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.