MBA RANKINGS

My Take on the New BW Survey  

Writers love it when media organizations make fools of themselves.  It gives us something to write about and puts food in our bellies. 

And the more absurd the error, the better the deal for us.  BusinessWeek’s 1998 rankings bought me a new car.  This year’s offering is certain to pay off my mortgage.  I picture book deals, endorsement contracts and speaking engagements at every B-school in the country.

Why am I so happy?  Mostly because BW ranked Stanford the nation’s eleventh best business school.  It’s among the most absurd things I’ve ever seen in print.  (I’ve heard worse fiction, but not even a fool would commit it to paper.) 

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I actually know which business school is the best in the country and, yes, it starts with an “S.” 

Why is Stanford the best?  It’s simple: opportunity.  I’ve seen it time and again.  It doesn’t matter whether you come into class as the most promising young investment banker at Salomon or as the accounts receivable clerk for the Bosley Hair Clinic, when you leave Stanford’s MBA program the corporate world will treat you like God Almighty. 

Not that you deserve it.  Frankly, no 27-year-old should be given the kind of clout that Stanford graduates (and the grads of other elite business schools) get.  But there’s a kind of aura about students who make their way into the best business schools that recruiters fall for every time, mostly because they’re naïve, non-management track people who didn’t go to B-school themselves and, therefore, don’t know any better.  (Ouch!)

Recruiters believe that anyone who makes it into one of the elite schools must be some kind of visionary, and that’s especially true if the candidate aced the GMAT.  Don’t believe me?  Ask the guy who came into my GMAT class two years ago with a 490, left with a 700 and is now at Wharton.

But I digress.

The best business schools are not those that do well in arbitrarily broad surveys of recruiters but rather those that open the doors to the best firms.  Sound elitist? Maybe it is.  But most students at the top business schools know the difference between working for Circuit City and working for McKinsey.  And while that distinction might not matter to Business Week, it matters to them.

That’s why schools such as Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg and Columbia are the best business schools in the country, regardless of what some dumb survey might say.  They manufacture the most “aura,” they open the most doors and they create the most opportunities.

So why is Stanford better than Harvard or Wharton?  Just a personal preference I guess.  The campus is beautiful and the atmosphere is refreshingly non-competitive.  There are no class rankings and no real grades.  Students spend a couple years passing the hookah around and then get paid Two Big Ones for offering their naïve opinions to ignorant business owners.  If that doesn’t deserve a Number One ranking, I don’t know what does.

So to all of you applicants navigating your way through the MBA admissions process, try to keep the rankings in perspective.  They don’t mean what you think they mean.

The MBA Applicant.com 
Top-10 Business Schools Survey!  
(Our Take on the Top Programs)

Methodology

I polled a couple dozen of my B-school friends, asking them for their thoroughly biased opinions.  If they didn’t have an opinion on a specific school I asked them to make one up.

To ensure the accuracy of our data I tabulated it while sober.  I then enlisted the services of a couple of my best GMAT students to make sure I had done the math correctly.

I don’t know any MBA recruiters, so I kind of had to leave their opinions out of our survey.  (Sorry.)  To make up for it, though, I created a new measurement of excellence called the “Intellectual Capital Score.”  (Translation: Fudge Factor.)   It’s an arbitrary criterion that I (like Business Week) added simply to keep elite schools from falling out of the rankings entirely, thereby making the survey look even more ridiculous than it already does.  (Take that BW!)

Very Funny, But Where Are the Real Rankings?

They're on the next page.