Rankings Morph Into Soap Opera.

After years of both blasting the rankings and touting the rankings, damning them and nurturing them, HBS and Wharton have said, "Enough!" They are refusing to cooperate with Businessweek's biannual MBA ranking. These two programs will not provide the magazine with their students' and alumni's e-mail addresses and contact information.

BW describes the situation in "Concerning the BW Survey," and rather defensively points out that another 100 schools are cooperating (although at least one adcom director whom I spoke to today believes this is the last time.) It assures its loyal fans not to despair because it will continue to do its survey.

BW sees its survey as a consumer satisfaction survey. The consumers of the b-school product are future employers and the students, and they are the ones who respond to BW's survey. One of the most frequent criticisms of BW's methodology is that those being polled -- the students -- have an enormous incentive to report positively on their experience because a good ranking means their diploma is worth more. Therefore their part of the customer satisfaction survey is biased. Others criticize BW (and the WSJ similarly) that employers have goals that diverge sharply from those of the students: hard working well-trained employees for as little money as possible. Students don't mind the "well-trained" part, but their goals as far as quantity of money and work are diametrically opposite the recruiters'.

Personally, I believe that if the "rankings" limited themselves to being "surveys," they would be more intellectually honest and less open to the following criticism: the rankings make schools try to fit a one-size-fits-all formula. In fact, no school is going to be #1 for every student. Schools are different and those differences will make School A #1 for Student A and School B #1 for Student B. The rankings, especially the overall rankings, camouflage this reality. And as I pointed out in my last post, rankings make it easy for students to be way too lazy in deciding which school to attend. The rankings should be a starting point in school research. All too often they are the start, middle, and end.

But are the schools really motivated by noble concerns for educational quality and student happiness? Or are they motivated by practical concerns that the plethora of rankings, especially for b-school, had simply become an administrative nightmare? Or are they uncomfortable being judged and held accountable?

How's this going to play out? Will other schools follow suit? Will BW rankings be further flawed and impaired? Is US News next in line? Will other grad categories or the colleges follow suit? Stay tuned for the next episode.