Selections Interview with Della Bradshaw, Editor of the Financial Times Business School Rankings

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Selections: What impact do you see your ranking, and rankings in general, having on business schools and management education?
Bradshaw: What our ranking has done is it has actually given prominence to schools outside of the U.S. I was up in Canada recently, and they were quite grateful that we do this ranking because no one had ever ranked them before and no one had ever compared them to U.S. schools. That is quite an interesting choice for people in North America. The inclusion of non-U.S. schools, which we were the first to do, has given greater prominence to those schools. To give you an example, I was at Stanford a year ago, and they said for the first time ever, someone had turned down a place at Stanford to go to INSEAD. And they had never had that before. People only turned down Stanford to go to Harvard.

Selections: Do you see any negative impact caused by the rankings?
Bradshaw: The more rankings there are, the better it is, in that it takes power away from publications. If you have a lot of rankings that paint very similar pictures—which I think they all do at the end of the day—that is a good thing. People who are recruiting or looking to get an MBA can have some confidence in them, or they can have more confidence.

What is negative? I think people take them too seriously. I really do. I find it extraordinary how seriously people take them. But that is a problem because there is very little information about the schools out there. Very little information on which prospective MBA students can base their judgments. There is a lot of wallpaper type of information out there. For example, in the U.K., we have a system—which is by no means a perfect system—but we have a government system for assessing all universities, including business schools, on teaching and research. The schools are ranked according to their teaching quality and research quality. Students obviously use that quite widely when they are choosing a school, and to my knowledge, there is nothing in the U.S. that does that. I think that is where the problem lies. If there was some sort of centralized, recognized system for ranking schools, then newspapers wouldn’t get away with it, really.

Selections: What is the benefit of ranking the schools as opposed to just publishing detailed profiles about the schools? Why say this school is number 1, and this school is number 18, and so on?
Bradshaw: This is a question I always get from the business schools. We also say in our copy that schools come in groups. Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton, they are in a group of their own. You wouldn’t choose one over another because of a ranking. You would choose Stanford because you want to live in California. You would follow all of the different personal reasons that come into play. So we do say that in our copy. We always say that. The advantage of publishing ranking numbers is you can see schools moving up and moving down. On our ranking, because it is an integrated ranking of all schools internationally, you get an awful lot of schools that are at much the same level. For that reason, it is very important to see the schools that are moving up and the schools that are moving down.

Selections: I know that research is an important element in your rankings. That is interesting to me because it doesn’t seem the other rankings look at that much, if at all.
Bradshaw: Business Week just added that with the 2000 ranking. If business schools are not doing contemporary research, what on earth are they teaching? The second reason and the most important reason is that business is now changing at such a pace that business schools themselves have to change to keep up with that. If they are not out there doing research and finding out what is going on, how on earth are they going to change their curriculum? Good teachers are good teachers. If they’re not doing research, what are they teaching? Teaching isn’t just about presentation and style. It’s about content.

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