To Rank Or Not To Rank: Deans’ Conclave Debates Merits Of B-School Rankings
Eleven deans, two deans-to-be, one interim dean, and a vice dean sat around a Southern California conference table this week in what was, probably, an unprecedented summit of business education leadership. Some had traveled thousands of miles to join their peers. One of the chief reasons — amid a broader discussion of the comprehensive value of a business education — was to discuss how business school rankings might better convey that comprehensiveness.
Invited to the campus of the USC Marshall School of Business on Tuesday, May 24 by Marshall Dean Geoff Garrett, the assemblage spent the day discussing such questions as the impacts of stakeholder capitalism on business education, how to capture the value of specialized master’s programs, and “What’s Next for Undergraduate Business Education?” But as Garrett told his guests and a select few members of the media in attendance, the main purpose of the conference was its opening discussion: business school rankings, their shortcomings, and the need, as he sees it, for a holistic ranking that considers the “totality” of schools’ offerings by incorporating undergraduate and other programs besides the full-time MBA.
Notably, however, some of those present questioned the need for rankings to exist at all. And that made for a robust discussion.
A CALL FOR CHANGE
Geoff Garrett
“I think it’s still the case that if somebody says to you, ‘I’m going to business school,’ what they mean is, ‘I’m doing an MBA,’ Garrett said in welcoming the assembled deans. “And in the rankings, those two things are often interchanged. The business school ranking is a ranking of a full-time MBA program, right? So to my mind, the challenge for us all is to help the world understand what business education actually is about, and change the conversation in a way that will be really helpful for all of our institutions.”
Garrett, Marshall’s dean since 2020 and dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School before that, convened the summit after publicly calling for a rethinking of the rankings earlier this year. “What I would like to see,” he told Poets&Quants in March, “is better rankings of the other important things that business schools do,” including possibly “having something like the attention that’s currently paid to full-time MBA, paid to undergraduate. I think that’d be great.”
Garrett pointedly decried the absence of a comprehensive undergraduate ranking to rival Poets&Quants’, or a ranking that incorporates undergraduate programs along with the more traditional focus on MBAs. On Tuesday (May 24) he told the gathered deans that it is “a leadership opportunity for all of us,” and one “that’s much better exercise collectively than individually.”
‘A HUGE MISALLOCATION OF SOCIAL ATTENTION & RESOURCES’
But in inviting more than a dozen of his peers — deans Andrew Karolyi of Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Matt Slaughter of Dartmouth Tuck School of Business, Sri Zaheer of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, Paul Almeida of Georgetown McDonough School of Business, Francine Lafontaine of Michigan Ross School of Business, Idalene Kesner of Indiana Kelley School of Business, Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou of Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business, Frank Hodge of Washington Foster School of Business, Doug Shackelford of UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, Jeff Brown of Illinois Gies College of Business, and Raghu Sundaram of NYU Stern School of Business; as well as Ohad Kadan, who begins his term as Arizona State Carey School of Business’ dean in July, and Gareth James, who takes the helm at Emory Goizueta Business School that month — Garrett may not have been wholly prepared for the antipathy some were willing — indeed, eager — to share for rankings in general.
After a brief introduction by Garrett and explanation of methodology by Andrew Jack, global education editor for The Financial Times who joined by Zoom from Davos, Switzerland, Brown, dean of the Gies College, began the discussion by, as he put it, “speaking truth to power.” Pointing out that Gies no longer has a full-time MBA and does not participate in rankings, he called for something closer to abolition than adjustment. “I think there’s an implicit assumption in this conversation that rankings are of a net positive social value, and I actually don’t think they are,” Brown said.
“I would disagree with Geoff about the desirability of having yet another ranking at the undergraduate level. I think U.S. News is terrible, but I don’t think Poets&Quants is a whole lot better. When I think about the choices that go into choosing a college, I mean, look around this table. If your kid goes to any one of our colleges, they’re going to get amazing education. And this idea that we’re going to rank this one No. 9 and that one No. 13, and that that difference has some value, I think actually distorts decision-making on the parts of families and parents. I think it also distorts decision-making for schools that are under pressure to focus on rankings.
“Is there a difference between a school that’s ranked No. 10 and a school that’s ranked No. 200? Sure. But that suggests some broad categories or maybe a report card, like, ‘Yeah, here’s a whole bunch of schools that get an A and here’s a whole bunch of schools that get a B.’ But this idea that we should care about whether we’re No. 7 or No. 9, or No. 10, or No. 20, is I think a huge misallocation of social attention and resources.”
Geoff Garrett, dean of USC Marshall: “The challenge for us all is to help the world understand what business education actually is about, and change the conversation in a way that will be really helpful for all of our institutions”
‘ALL OF US HAVE DIFFERENT MISSIONS’
Paul Almeida, dean of Georgetown McDonough, said that while “all of us, at least at times, find ranking extremely distasteful, especially when we do badly in them, or relatively badly,” he still understood the demand. “I think all of us agree there are many severe limitations to rank things as they currently do,” Almeida said. “Having said that, the market seems to have this ravenous appetite for rankings, and we just have to admit that’s a reality, whether we like it or not. And sometimes presidents and provosts also want to be judging a few things.
“So I think both makes a lot of sense. I think we have to work towards improving the rankings in whatever way we can.”
Sri Zaheer, who is stepping down as dean at Minnesota Carlson after 11 years, decried the emphasis on career outcomes that compares schools in very different regions, serving different industries. It’s apples and oranges, she said.
“All of us have slightly different missions,” Zaheer said. “We serve different corporate environments, we serve different communities, and that makes a huge difference. For instance, in our case, about 60% of our students go into consumer marketing jobs, where the starting salaries are lower. But am I going to insist that, ‘Hey, listen, let’s direct more of our students to go to Wall Street?’ I don’t think that makes any sense. It’s not serving the corporate population, which is hungry for talent from us. I mean, so much apples and oranges: There’s this effort to try and assume that all the business schools are exactly the same in terms of what they do. It’s not driven by the majority of really good business schools.”
CHOOSING A HIGHER-RANKED SCHOOL CAN BE A BAD PERSONAL DECISION
Doug Shackelford, dean of UNC Kenan-Flagler, said rankings’ focus on numbers is the problem.
“I think, in many ways, once you put the number there, no one else sees anything else,” he said. “That number is overwhelming. And I think of it this way: If you ask me, ‘What is the best car?’ That’s not a useful question because I need to know, ‘What do you want do with your car?’ So it’s hard to say what’s the best car.” Addressing FT’s Andrew Jack, he added: “If you thought of yourself as something like Consumer Reports, which just lays out a lot of information, and then the consumer can decide, because I’m not sure I have the right car for students. I’ve got the right car for some students. (Tuck’s) Matthew (Slaughter) may have the right car for some other students.
“So I think just dump all the information out that you guys find and then let the consumer sort through it, that is better than trying to say that my school is better than Matthew’s, or his school is better than mine. Because for some students, it is true, but once you put a number, you have forced it.
“And I see this way too often, where students come to our school because it’s ranked higher than some other school. And they make a bad decision because they’d actually be better at a lower-ranked school and vice versa. So I would say, if you’re trying to maximize social welfare, think about dropping the number and dumping the information down.”
WHAT’S NEXT?
What will come of this summit? In March, Geoff Garrett said he hoped it would lead to the creation of a better, more holistic B-school ranking. “What I would like to see,” he told P&Q, “is better rankings of the other important things that business schools do.” He gave P&Q a nod for its undergraduate ranking, which employs a complex methodology unlike the U.S. News ranking of undergrad programs, which “is just a beauty contest” where he and other deans are simply asked “What do you think?”
“They can do better,” Garrett said. “I’d like to try to help them do better — so, having something like the attention that’s currently paid to full-time MBA, paid to undergraduate. I think that’d be great.”
“That was basically what I said to all the deans. I said, ‘Hey, we’re all comprehensive schools. Let’s sit down together and talk about how we should think about that.’ The communication impact of the rankings in business schools is massive. So we’d like to be communicating more accurately what we do — that’s the way I think about it.”
Speaking to Poets&Quants before the summit with her fellow deans, Tepper’s Bajeux-Besnainou said she wanted to attend because of the importance of the topic.
“We are a comprehensive business school,” she said. “So it’s not only the MBA program, but more than that. And I think being recognized as a comprehensive business school, where we educate all the different generations, is something really important. It’s very important for me.”
Bajeux-Besnainou started her career in Paris before spending more than two decades at George Washington University, where she eventually became associate dean for undergraduate programs. “So undergraduate programs are very close to my heart. I think at Tepper we have amazing undergraduate students and they’re just doing amazingly well in an environment at Carnegie Mellon that is very interdisciplinary. So I think it’s really wonderful because I also think that in undergraduate business education, it’s really important to be more than just business skills.
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