Harvard Business School Alumni

After Twenty Years, Rankings Remain Controversial

By Roger Thompson | Feb 04, 2008

The School’s Centennial year just happens to coincide with another important anniversary, one many business schools would like to forget: the debut of BusinessWeek’s school rankings in 1988. Talk about disruptive.

Up to that point, business schools built their reputations on research productivity and scholarly reputations of faculty, writes HBS professor Rakesh Khurana in his new book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands. BusinessWeek had the audacity to base its rankings on the view of the schools’ two main “customers,” students and the corporations that hired them. The rankings were such a marketplace hit that several other publications launched their own over the next several years, including Forbes, the Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, and the Wall Street Journal.

For better or worse, the rankings came to dominate would-be students’ perceptions of business schools. And business schools developed at best a love-hate relationship with the rankings. Those that moved up from obscurity tended to like them. Perennial leaders like HBS and Wharton regarded them as meaningless “beauty contests” and stopped cooperating with the various publications’ “burdensome” data demands several years ago. Both advise prospective students that the rankings provide little useful information for matching one’s ambitions with a particular school’s program.

Stepping into the fray, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has developed a database that permits school comparisons based on objective measures. The MBA Pathfinder Data Warehouse stores admissions, enrollment, and employment information. If not exactly an antidote to the rankings, Pathfinder can at least lay claim to being the definitive source of information for anyone shopping for comparative data.

So after twenty years, the rankings rule — even as GMAC attempts to counterpunch — and their publishers are raking in a ton of dough. Some schools cheer, while others rankle. And the question for prospective students remains: Are the rankings worth the paper they are printed on?