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Making the Most of Rankings
In this excerpt from an article published in BizEd,
Andrew Policano, dean of the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of
California, Irvine, provides three suggestions for business school leaders to make the most of the rankings.
If rankings of MBA programs were to disappear tomorrow, few
business school deans would mourn their loss. However, given that rankings do
play a role in a business school’s reputation, administrators and faculty can
use them to improve the caliber and quality of their programs.
1. Get to know the
rankings editors. Editors of the rankings are generally open to the concerns
and questions of business school deans and faculty. In fact, they often welcome
the exchange of ideas. Although Jennifer Merritt has left BusinessWeek as its
rankings editor, she notes that she was always ready to offer deans rankings
information about their schools. “For anyone who asked, I put together an
individual profile of that school, from the student and recruiter rankings, to a
large sampling of student comments, to what type of companies ranked that school
highly,” says Merritt. “I think that kind of information is incredibly
valuable and often tells business school administrators something they haven’t
heard directly from their own students and recruiters.”
“Even if schools don’t like how they do in our
rankings, we’ve always kept the lines of communication open,” says Ron Alsop
of the Wall Street Journal. “We meet with any schools that want to meet with
us. In fact, it was the feedback from schools that led us to create three
rankings—national, regional, and international—instead of one.”
2. Understand the
methodologies. To fill a niche in the marketplace, each ranking takes a
slightly different approach to its calculations and focuses on different aspects
of business education. By knowing which rankings best suit its strengths and
which do not, a business school can focus its efforts, conserve its resources,
and make a case to stakeholders when it does better on one ranking than on
another.
3.
Keep it in perspective. Some rankings editors
argue that although the rankings
exert significant influence over business schools, they also have boosted the
public’s overall interest in business education.
Whether an educator loves them or hates them, the rankings have certainly
brought more attention to the MBA in general, says Kurt Badenhausen of Forbes.
“We are telling readers that an MBA is a winning situation financially, that
no matter where they get MBAs, they’ll make back their investment,” says
Badenhausen. “That’s a positive all schools can take away from the
rankings.”
Do media rankings impact dean careers?
That’s the question addressed by researchers at Michigan State University and
University of Virginia address in their article in Financial Management. Download
article…
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