Business School Rankings and Making the Right Choice for You

This article is the first of a two-part series on Business School Rankings.

For prospective students, selecting a business school can be one of the most important decisions in their personal and professional lives. A variety of publications now provide rankings that aim to assess the quality and value of graduate business education. But what do rankings tell us and how should we use them in making such critical decisions?

Key Rankings and their Methodologies

The quality and value of a graduate business programme are highly subjective with differing criteria. As a result, an assortment of business school rankings has emerged over the years. These include the Bloomberg-Business Week, Financial Times, Economist, Forbes, QS World Universities and the US News and World Report (USNWR) rankings.

These lists can differ significantly in terms of ranking criteria and weightings, geographical focus, programme coverage and data collection methods. As a result, they can produce quite different ranking results - which often differ from year-to-year.

Despite the varying differences, rankings may still be a useful starting point when selecting a business school, but it is equally important to understand how each ranking is derived.

For starters, it’s good to note that rankings generally tend to focus only on MBA programmes rather than the full portfolio of business school postgraduate offerings. Hence, many of the published rankings may not reflect the quality of non-MBA graduate programmes.

Furthermore, some rankings only focus on particular geographical regions such as the US, or only consider full-time programmes; while others exclude distance learning programmes. This means that some published rankings will be more relevant than others, depending on the type of programme, mode of delivery and geographical region a prospective student is interested in.

Some high-quality business schools may, for a variety of reasons, not be included in the rankings at all — with some schools excluded on the basis of class size, accreditation and/or failure to meet minimum survey response rates, while others may deselect themselves by declining to participate in the process.

Table 1: Selection Criteria

Sources: Based on mba.com, usnews.com, topmba.com, economist.com, bloomberg.com, ft.com, as of April 2020.

Ranking Criteria and Weightage

To add to one’s already long list of considerations, ranking methodologies also differ in criteria weightage. The Forbes ranking, for example, focuses exclusively on the return on investment (ROI), which is not a significant element in the other ranking methods.

Table 2: Ranking Criteria and Weightage(%)

Source: Based on mba.com and individual ranking publications. Note: QS data are based on Masters in Management weightage as of Apr 2020.

Bloomberg, for example, also recently revamped its ranking methodology and now includes entrepreneurship and networking as important aspects in their quality criteria. Meanwhile, QS places significant emphasis on faculty quality and employer reputation, and USNWR includes student selectivity (i.e. programme admission requirements) as a key quality factor, while the FT rankings emphasises compensation and international exposure.

In addition, how specific criteria is defined and measured in the different ranking publications can also differ significantly. It is also worth remembering that some quality indicators are also likely prone to bias, whether the underlying data is qualitative survey-based or (potentially unaudited) quantitative data reported by the business schools themselves.

Hence, while informative, rankings are just one of many considerations when deciding on the right graduate business programme. In the next article, we speak with graduates from Singapore Management University Lee Kong Chian School of Business (SMU LKCSB) to find out more about their considerations that led them to their decision.