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Selections Interview with Della Bradshaw, Editor of the Financial Times Business School Rankings
Selections: Why did the Financial Times decide to begin ranking business schools?
Bradshaw: There were a number of reasons. One of them was actually pressure from business schools outside of the U.S. There was a lot of concern that all of the rankings were solely U.S. rankings. The second reason was we felt we could develop a methodology that would actually give a lot of insight into a lot of different business schools and programs. The third reason was we thought it was of value to readers to have an international ranking, which hadn’t existed before.
Selections: How did you develop the methodology—including the weighting system—for your survey?
Bradshaw: We started out by setting up an advisory group of people from different business schools. They advised us on what they felt should be in there. Research was one of the elements that they were very keen on, which is why we have that in there. At the end of the day, we asked MBA students why they were doing this, and the general response was that it was to change careers or get a better job or to move into a different sector. And that is what we are trying to measure. We are trying to measure the degree of career progression that an MBA gives you, which is why our methodology is based on interviewing alumni from three years ago. Because most of those alumni who respond have actually changed jobs since they graduated. After three years, most of them are in different jobs.
Selections: In your survey questions, do you ask alumni questions about the classes they took in business school or questions that would get at the quality of their MBA education?
Bradshaw: All the business schools we look at—and we look at more than 100—they are all quality programs. They are all very, very good programs. So if you ask those people about the quality of their education, I would expect them to be very, very positive. You would expect them to get a good education. But also, they have no experience with any other business school, so it would be difficult for them to make an assessment. That is, in fact, why we look at career progression, because that actually shows what employers are prepared to pay these people and what jobs employers are prepared to give these people.
Selections: How is the Financial Times survey different from the other surveys that are out there?
Bradshaw: With the exception of the Wall Street Journal, we are the only one that does an integrated ranking that is completely international. One of the concerns I have about comparing the different rankings is that when you see the rankings compared, the fact that we are international is not taken into account. The MBA Newsletter—which is an excellent publication—but when it compared the rankings, it didn’t take into account that you cannot directly compare the numbers in our rankings to those in U.S. News and Business Week—because they have only U.S. schools in their rankings. When I compare them, I take out from our rankings all of the U.S. schools and create a U.S.-only ranking and compare that to U.S. News and Business Week. I find it interesting that there is enormous similarity in the schools. If you compare those, the top 18 schools in the U.S. are the same schools in slightly different order. Business Week uses three elements: students, recruiters, and research. U.S. News and the FT also use three elements. Then you look at the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. They both used a single criterion, so theirs are quite different.
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.
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.
© Selections: Fall 2001