When Deepti Chandrasekaran, an MBA student from India, was researching which business schools to apply to, one of the first places she turned to were the many MBA rankings lists. And one in particular caught her eye.
"I looked at the rankings as a starting point. Queen's was on top in the Business Week [international] rankings. I didn't really look at the data the different surveys included. It was just finding out who ranked well and then researching from there," she recalls.
And while Queen's School of Business might have been a beneficiary in this case — Ms. Chandrasekaran, 25, is now in its MBA program — the Kingston, Ont. school (and indeed many of its competitors) view the rankings game with distinctly mixed feelings.
Competition is hotter than ever between the world's business schools to attract the brightest students and the attention of wealthy benefactors. And rankings have become a fact of life for academics who find themselves participating, albeit often reluctantly, in highly publicized surveys they hope will put their MBA programs in the spotlight.
Meanwhile, MBA and EMBA rankings have turned into a highly lucrative industry for the major media outlets that produce them, including Business Week, Forbes, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, as well as many non-English publications.
But MBA rankings can bring as much confusion as clarity.
Different rankings use very different survey tools, data and methodologies. A particular school may be placed several points below another with only a micro-point per cent separating them. Or, like Queen's, for example, they may sometimes take themselves out of the running intentionally.
While Queen's is participating in the Business Week MBA rankings (where they place first among non-U.S. schools), the school is not currently involved with the Financial Times list of full-time MBAs, widely considered to be one of the most authoritative.
"The Financial Times survey is focused on salary," says Queen's School of Business Dean David Saunders. "We completely redesigned our program three years ago and our program is not structured to concentrate on salary. I have never met a student in 26 years who said the primary reason they were attending an MBA program is to increase their salary."
Dr. Saunders says they chose to participate in Business Week "after we designed our program, because [the survey] is based on satisfaction. It asks if you got what you wanted, are you happy with it." As to whether satisfaction can be equated with quality, "it does correlate at some point," Dr Saunders says, but adds: "it's only one piece."
Accreditation is a more important gauge of MBA quality, according to most school officials, but there's no doubt rankings play a role in attracting new students (especially those from abroad) and keeping a warm glow of satisfaction from alumni.
Ms. Chandrasekaran, says rankings played one key role: helping her create a shortlist of schools she'd like to check out for her graduate degree.
After that, she says, her "real research was in speaking to alumni, reading reports about the schools, reading blogs about curriculum, faculty, length of the program."
She says she views rankings as "a lot of PR and marketing because there's a huge market for MBA students." That said, she admits she would "feel badly if we fell in rank. Students do know that we're on top in Business Week and we're happy about it. We would definitely want to maintain our ranking."
This seeming contradiction — the rankings don't really mean much but we want (or need) to be among them — sums up how many in the MBA schools see the rankings.
