Selections Interview with John Byrne, Senior Writer at Business Week

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Selections: You were involved in creating Business Week’s first business school ranking in 1988. Why did Business Week begin ranking business schools?
Byrne: I had recently come over from Forbes magazine, where I actually began writing about graduate education. The initial impressions I had about MBA education back then—and we’re talking about the mid-1980s, ancient history—is that it was typical academia. No one thought they had customers that they had to be responsible to. This is an interesting issue even today, oddly enough, where that argument is frequently made at universities. I thought that if it had any legitimacy, it certainly had less legitimacy in a school of business, where the graduates were immediately employable in companies where they were expected to perform very quickly. Back in the mid-1980s, the most common criticism of the elite MBA [programs] was that [recruiters] would get these remarkably smart people into their companies, but [the graduates’] aspirations were so high and their interpersonal skills so low that there tended to be a good deal of dissatisfaction with them. That was particularly in corporate America. Less so in the field of investing banking and consulting, where there seemed to be a greater tolerance for arrogance. And the schools seemed to not care very much. With a few exceptions, I should say, the schools didn’t seem to care very much about the attitudes or the perceptions of the customers: the people who actually buy their product.

I felt two things. I felt there was no marketplace, really, to make the schools even pay attention to the demand. Why? You could say the marketplace existed because you could say they [the corporations] could simply not hire, but that is not the way it is. What was happening is, the people who were going to the [MBA] programs were remarkably talented, but they needed a little more seasoning. They needed more opportunities to work with people and through people to understand how important that was in the workplace.

The other thing you had going on at that time in the mid-1980s is the students were treated just as students, and there was a very heavy bent toward research—even though business schools are professional schools. This was at the expense—at the severe expense—of teaching quality. So when you talked to MBAs about their experience, they were still generally very positive about it, but they had very severe concerns about the quality of the teaching and the lack of attention to detail in these institutions that affected both the learning and the environment for the student. And you had many of the professors who would speak with derision about their obligation to communicate knowledge.

So what I thought is, one thing that a ranking would actually do is to create a market where none had existed. Create a market where schools could be rewarded and punished for failing to be responsive to their two primary constituents: the students and the corporations. I’m not talking about inexperienced kids. Here, we’re talking about people who have been out in the workplace already and have come back and [are] paying a lot of money, and they should be discriminating. And the schools should be forced to listen, but they weren’t. The corporations were hiring these people and were having problems getting them to, number one, stick and, number two, get along with other employees, and getting a real payback from the cost of hiring.

So, I thought that if we were to create a market, what we would have to do is to survey these two different and two very important constituents of the business school community. I went out and found lists of the latest graduates from the top programs. I went out and did a study on who were the major recruiters of MBAs.

Selections: When you say the top programs, how many schools did you start with and how did you determine which schools to survey?
Byrne: The first survey appeared in November of 1988. And I don’t remember exactly how many schools we initially surveyed. I think we basically focused on around 30 schools to get the top 20.

Selections: And this was looking at the “top schools” based just on general reputation? Were there other rankings at that time to guide you to the top schools?
Byrne: There have been rankings forever. Most of the rankings before this were driven by faculty research and were driven by a number of professors. And U.S. News & World Report [rankings] came out in around 1990. The first survey they came out with was so embarrassing, because they actually included Princeton in the list. Why? Because—I forget how they arrived at that—but I remember Princeton was on the list because whoever they asked simply named Princeton because of its overall reputation, not knowing that that school didn’t have an MBA program.

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