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

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Selections: What do you see for the future of the Financial Times ranking and rankings in general?
Bradshaw: This autumn, we are doing an executive MBA ranking. That gives us three rankings: full-time MBA, executive MBA, and executive programs. Because we do them annually, that is a very full program for us. That is a lot to ask business schools to do. Although, I have to say, they [the schools] have been magnificent. We were chatting just now about how far we’ve gotten in collecting the information for the executive MBA. Virtually every business school has supplied all of the information to a deadline. That is quite amazing. That didn’t happen three years ago, I can tell you. I think they do brilliantly. So for us, that is where we are. We reassess every criterion that we use every year, because things do change. Last year, for example, with the MBA rankings, we tried to bring in share options as well as salary. And we asked the questions. It was surprising how few people who did respond were in the dot-coms that we thought they might be in. That, of course, fell about early this year. So that criterion is gone. Again, we look at the way we measure things each time we do them. We look at the way we measure research, because it is really quite a sensitive area for academics. It’s one of the things they really care about, and they care about how we measure it. Do we allocate one point to everybody equally if they participated in joint research? We get a lot of questions, but we do look at all of it every year.

I can’t imagine any other international magazine or newspaper is going to get into this business. You’ve got Forbes and Business Week, U.S. News, Wall Street Journal, and the FT covering a whole range of methodologies. There was a very good ranking a few years ago about the best business schools for women. That type of thing is brilliant. There was some talk about business schools pulling out of the rankings altogether a few months ago. You would need three business schools to pull out. You would need Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton to pull out and you would have it, really. But will they?

Selections: What steps could you take to ensure that they don’t pull out? What are the things you as a publication can do to ensure that they continue to want to participate?
Bradshaw: It’s to produce a ranking that they feel has validity. And the indications are that is the case. Clearly, the business schools that don’t do very well don’t like it. But I think most business schools have some concerns about our rankings, but they are generally supportive of them.

Selections: How do you audit the data the schools supply?
Bradshaw: We are hoping to use an auditing firm to audit the data for our January MBA 2002 rankings. We are still dealing with that, because it is very expensive. I don’t think the schools like the idea of it at all, to be honest. There are some schools that already audit their data. Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada always sends audited data, and they were trying to get other Canadian schools to do this. They believe this is a good thing. But nobody else took them up on it. There is a lot of talk about schools that may not submit accurate data. The only way to deal with that is to audit it.

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