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Beyond a few top schools, there is a remarkable lack of consistency between the various rankings. What accounts for this lack of consistency?

The answer is: the different methodologies employed by each ranking. Any informed attempt to make use of rankings must begin with a basic understanding of the methodologies employed.

Business Week rankings evaluate the quality of an MBA with three criteria: student satisfaction, employer satisfaction and research output. A weakness of the ranking is that it maintains a strong bias towards both US MBA recruiters and US Students (the proportion or European students questioned is rarely higher than 10%). Another is that it is obviously in a student's interest to speak favorably of his or her school and watch it climb the rankings. In addition, the Business Week evaluation of academic research is based entirely on articles published by faculty in US academic journals. As a consequence, it is unable to measure the comparable quality of research from non-US schools whose faculty regularly publishes in non-US journals.

The Financial Times (FT) relies on more objective measures and contains no input from recruiters in their survey, but places a heavy weighting on "Weighted Salary Three Years After Graduation", followed by "Research Rating" and a rating of the "Number of Doctoral Students" produced by the school. Compared with Business Week and the Wall Street Journal, the FT is more global in scope, directly comparing American and international MBA programmes. Limitations of the FT methodology revolve around the validity of directly comparing one and two year programmes. In addition, the heavy emphasis on salary three years after graduation can bias results in favor of schools with strong ties to the investment banking industry (which tends to pay the most at this stage of alumni careers) - hence, the resultant bias in US schools towards East-Coast rather than West-Coast or Mid-State schools.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ranking has caused the most controversy of the rankings, using criteria not adopted by others. In particular, it asks recruiters to focus on their recruiting experience and the profile of candidates they meet from a school, rather than the quality of the school itself. The WSJ also does not differentiate between alumni, coming back on campus, and independent recruiters.

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Source: -
Nunzio Quacquarelli
Website: www.topmba.com