Selections Interview with with Parminder Bahra, Senior Adviser on Education Projects, Financial Times

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Selections: What is your role with the Financial Times rankings?
Bahra: One is to help with the methodology and to put together questionnaires. Second is to actually compile the information and put together the rankings themselves.

Selections: The 2001 rankings were the third Financial Times MBA rankings, and the rankings are annual?
Bahra: Yes. We started in 1997.

Selections: What are the goals behind the Financial Times business school rankings?
Bahra: Ultimately, to provide a basis on which we can compare MBA programs and the institutions that run them on an international setting. And it is ultimately to provide information for users. Also, with the rankings goes a series of articles. So, we like to think that existing or current MBA students and alumni or graduates might also find things of interest here, as well as faculty and other members of the school.

Selections: Whom do you consider to be your main audience for the rankings?
Bahra: Potential MBA students. Having said that, we have the rankings themselves, which appear as a survey once a year. But we also have a Monday page in the paper, which also provides information for not only potential MBAs but also the graduates and faculty and members of the business school community.

Selections: How are the Financial Times rankings different from the other MBA rankings out there, particularly those published by Business Week, U.S. News & World Report, and the Wall Street Journal?
Bahra: Each ranking addresses different issues. You can change the angle of a ranking according to the questions you ask. If you look at the different rankings across the board, they are all different—some quite radically different than others; some are quite close. There is an element of the history and the legacy of rankings. For instance, when the Business Week ranking was only U.S.-based, it was easier to run a survey of employers. I think if you’re trying to measure the reaction to business schools in the context of employers internationally, it becomes more difficult. In that sense, we provide a series of criteria that are slightly different, and when they are put together, you get a slightly different ranking. And it is up to the reader to come to a decision as to how to best use the information there.

Selections: Is there one survey that you feel you are most closely aligned with?
Bahra: I think it kind of changes. There are certain criteria that we have seen other publications bring on board. Also, because we have a single international ranking, I think that makes us somewhat unique. Where the ranking has already existed for the U.S., it is then difficult to apply it internationally without changing the methodology in a big way. In that sense, it is difficult to say we are quite close to one or the other. I think there are certain criteria that are universal, for instance, salaries. Everyone knows that the purchasing power of the MBA is pretty much determined through the salary. I think that is where you will find a great deal of uniformity across the business school rankings put out by the different publications.

Selections: Creating and conducting rankings seems to require a lot of time and effort. How does the Financial Times benefit from this time and effort?
Bahra: Ultimately, it is to be seen and involved in the business community. It is a financial paper, so it has to be seen to be operating in areas where finance and business are of interest. I think it is an extension of the work that we have done in the past. It just seemed to make a lot more sense to have a slightly higher profile, and rankings are one way to increase your profile within an area. And that is one major part of the rankings—to raise our profile in this community and, hopefully, to be accepted. Given the feedback we get, we do feel very much as part and parcel of this community, and the information we provide is of use.

Selections: You said that prospective MBA students are the main audience for your rankings. How should they be using the information provided in your survey?
Bahra: We produce the tables themselves that list all of the individual criteria. And we have a few tools on the Web that can help narrow down choices of schools a prospective business school student might want to look at. But they ought to look at individual criteria, and students should consider the reasons behind what they are doing: Why they want to get an MBA; the areas they expect to specialize in; what they expect to get out of it. I think some of these criteria will indicate the schools that are good in the areas they are interested in, schools that they might want to look at further. Our ranking alone ranks 100 schools. If you were to find out information on 100 schools, it would take you the best part of a couple years. It’s a bit like narrowing down and fine-tuning your search for business schools.

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