A Psychometric Assessment of the Businessweek, U.S. News & World Report, and Financial Times Rankings of Business Schools’ MBA Programs

Abstract

This research investigates the reliability and validity of three major publications' rankings of MBA programs. Each set of rankings showed reasonable consistency over time, both at the level of the overall rankings and for most of the facets from which the rankings are derived. Each set of rankings also showed some levels of convergent and discriminant validity, but each has room for improvement, particularly Businessweek, which relies heavily on subjective surveys of students and recruiters, and Financial Times, whose methodology may be simplified and streamlined, ceasing to measure facets that are empirically superfluous. Together the three publications blanket the student process-U.S. News & World Report captures incoming student quality clearly with GMAT scores, Businessweek captures whether the students are happy while at their respective business schools, and U.S. News captures salaries and Financial Times captures return on investment, as short-term and longer term indicators of graduates' early career successes.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Organizational Rankings: A Multidisciplinary Review of the Literature and Directions for Future Research

“…In contrast, other studies find significant annual variability in the ranking position of some organizations (Piro & Sivertsen, 2016), especially for performance on specific attributes (Carter & Ruefli, 2006;Iacobucci, 2013). Such variation is attributed to statistical noise (e.g., Bookstein et al, 2010), changes in rankings criteria and methodology (e.g., Tofallis, 2012), and exogenous events (e.g., Piro & Sivertsen, 2016).…”

“…Some scholars take a different point of view, arguing that, with reasonable expectations, rankings can facilitate decision making, especially if they are designed as “multi-dimensional transparency tools” that factor in the multiplicity of stakeholder interests (Van Vught & Westerheijden, 2010). Researchers (e.g., Iacobucci, 2013; Robinson-García, Torres-Salinas, López-Cózar, & Herrera, 2014) suggest that stakeholder audiences are best served by multiple rankings and the recognition that some rankings are appropriate for short-term planning while others can inform medium- and long-term decision making (Hou et al, 2012).…”

“…Fourth, scholars have examined the extent to which rankings of the same organizational populations converge. While rankings of environmental performance (e.g., Elsayed, 2006), law schools (Hitt, Bierman, Shimizu, & Kochhar, 2001), MBA programs (Iacobucci, 2013), and universities (e.g., Boliver, 2015; Claassen, 2015) are highly correlated across multiple rankings within their fields, Dichev (1999) finds that contemporaneous changes in rankings of business schools are uncorrelated. Also, Fortune rankings of social performance have been found to be inconsistent with the Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini index that captures firms’ environmental, social, and governance performance (Liston-Heyes & Ceton, 2009), and Chan, Fung, Fung, and Yau (2016) show that research rankings of schools differ with the criteria used.…”

University Rankings: Evidence and a Conceptual Framework

“…Longitudinal equilibrium as the first proposition of university ranking has also been the primary finding of studies of American law schools (Espeland and Sauder ; Jones ; Sauder and Espeland ; Sauder and Lancaster ), schools of business (Iacobucci ), and schools of public policy and administration (Frederickson and Stazyk ). These findings are particularly relevant to the study of university rankings and ranking systems given the observed “halo effect,” in which the reputational assessments of individual programs or departments are conflated by the reputation of the university of a whole, leading, in some cases, to nonexistent professional schools at prestigious universities receiving high reputational assessments (Brooks ; Webster ).…”

An Effective MBA: Perspectives of Students, Faculty, and Employers

“…The MBA degree has been shown to enable students to (a) obtain jobs, (b) earn higher salaries, and (c) succeed in subsequent job performance (Iacobucci, 2013). Attaching the MBA to your name can affect your hiring chances, your networking abilities, and your innovation skills (Mondalek & Rogers, 2013).…”