Selections Interview with John Byrne, Senior Writer at Business Week

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Selections: The first Business Week ranking came out in November 1998, and that is the survey in which Kellogg came out on top, correct?
Byrne: Yes. There was a lot of surprise about that. But there wasn’t any surprise to those who were listening to number 1. The problem was, no one was listening to customers except Kellogg. For example, the most common criticism of MBAs in corporate America was that they couldn’t get along with the workforce and they were very weak in communication and interpersonal skills. Well, guess what, Kellogg had listened to that criticism years before and had become the only school at the time to interview 100 percent of the applicants. So the fact that they were able to graduate, number one, people who had better interpersonal skills, was no accident, and secondly because they didn’t have at the time this elitist image that some of the long-time traditional leaders with MBA education had, their graduates were more easily embraced and more eagerly received than traditional MBA graduates, because that is what they were trying to address.

I should mention one other example about Northwestern. Northwestern was also one of the first schools to make their students work in teams. What would be helpful in terms of history here, one time at a conference when Dean Jacobs mentioned the culture of the school and the emphasis on teamwork, another dean from a very prominent school turned to him and said, “At my school, we call that cheating.” For students to work together on projects, to help each other—“We call that cheating.” That was sort of the mindset at the time. It is important to note that because today, teamwork is taken for granted. We accept that that is the way it should be, and everyone does it. Back in the late ’80s, only Northwestern was doing it, and it made a very big difference. It is why they turned out to be number 1.

Remember—and this is another important thing—you can argue about what is best. Some may say “best” doesn’t necessarily mean that the corporations that hire the MBAs are happy with the MBAs they hire, and that the graduates think they have gotten the return on their money and are happy with their education. “Best” means we have a faculty that is leading edge in their field and our faculty publishes in all of the “A” journals, and if you want the latest, smartest, most intellectual faculty, then you probably wouldn’t go to Northwestern. I would argue that that is not what “best” is at all. In fact, if you were that strong in research, you were probably a lousy school for both corporations and students. And that is what made it so controversial. And I have to say what I liked about this work, what made me passionate about it, was the sense that you could create a marketplace that had not previously existed, and then schools had the option of saying, “We think this is garbage, and we are going to ignore it.” Or they could respond to it. In the beginning, there was a lot of controversy and arguments about whether we should pander to students and corporations: “Why should we do that? That is beneath us. We are educators. And we shouldn’t have to treat our students as customers, and we shouldn’t have to treat those companies that come and hire our MBAs as customers.” That is really ridiculous. That is what a lot of schools thought at the time. And to this day, frankly, the most heated rhetoric about rankings is also tied into this very point. You still have professors and you still have deans—primarily at heavy, heavy research schools—who still think this is terrible.

Selections: I’ve heard people argue that they believe the curriculum at the schools is being watered down because the faculty is trying to make the students happy.
Byrne: I think that is completely bogus, because basically, the people who go into these programs—especially in the last decade—the amount of talent that these schools are able to attract is frankly mind-boggling. And if you look at the great diversity of the students, and their backgrounds, professional and personal, it is truly awe-inspiring. These people are very discriminating, and if, in fact, they went to a school with watered-down curriculum or a place where they could get an easy A and where there was not a lot of hard work, guess what? They [the schools] would get graded down for that, particularly in our survey. Because we do, in fact, ask specific questions about workload. And if, in fact, the workload is perceived to be too light, the school gets marked down for that. People who say things like that are basically selling their students short. Now, has some of that occurred? Probably. But if it has occurred in a way that truly weakens the program, oh, we would pick it up in the survey.

The beauty of the survey is this: It allows us to reach thousands upon thousands of the latest crop of MBAs and ask them, really, the most important questions you can about their educational experience. And as a reporter, when you gather that much information from that large a group of schools and from over that large a group of backgrounds, boy, you have your hands on stuff that is really valuable. The surveys often are a starting point, incidentally, for deeper, more thoughtful reporting. Because when those surveys come in, we often use them to go back to these students personally and interview them. And that is where the richness really comes out, and allows the magazine to spot trends long before they can be spotted elsewhere.
The other thing this system did, in terms of creating a market, is we sent one questionnaire that went to the students of all the schools and one questionnaire that went to all the corporate recruiters. And for the first time there was—by accident, frankly—a system where you could literally measure schools on everything from how well the placement office worked to how well the students performed to the communicating ability of the students to how well the culture of the school was suited to the infrastructure. You had a standardized form to measure each school against each other. And, ultimately, that added a lot of value, because schools could really benchmark each other in ways they couldn’t before. Also, it allowed us and others to more clearly differentiate one school from another.

Selections: I know there has been some concern regarding coaching of students. Have you seen any evidence of that? Are there steps you have taken to prevent that?
Byrne: We have seen evidence of that. It has occurred occasionally and sporadically over the years. We have taken a number of steps to prevent it and correct it when it does occur. In the early years, there was no problem with this. Because it wasn’t that established. In fact, when I first surveyed the graduates, they didn’t even know what we were doing. No one knew I was creating a ranking, because I didn’t go running around telling everyone. In fact, I didn’t know what it would be. I didn’t even know it would be used for a ranking. I wanted to know what was going on at each school and how value was perceived by the graduates. Because no one had bothered to ask in any systematic fashion. Then it evolved into that [the rankings].

One of the first things we do is we have a professional statistician look at the results of the survey as they come in, and to do all sorts of analysis on the results. The analysis is primarily designed to basically cause red flags to be run up the flag pole and to spot irregular patterns in the way the surveys are filled out. Basically, the statistician can signal where the statistician thinks there might be a problem. And where there is, we can begin to investigate. That is number one.

Number two. Every survey has an open-ended question that allows graduates to just speak out on any subject whatsoever. When you have people who are 28 years of age and are discriminating people, if there was any sort of campaign, inevitably they tell us. You would be shocked at what they tell us. We find out everything from an affair with the dean to. . . They report everything. In every school, you have cheerleaders, and in every school, you have people with an ax to grind. You will find out unbelievable things. You will find out about the professors who just don’t give a damn—by name. You’ll find out about the placement offices that drop the ball. And you’ll find out if there was any sort of effort at all on campus to rig the results.

Besides all of that, I believe we also do not use one set of numbers for the full ranking. Meaning that we dilute the effect of any one year’s survey. We believe the quality of the school shouldn’t change too dramatically from one survey year to another survey year. If for any reason we don’t catch it with those other two—the study by the statistician as well as the comments made by graduates—either of which leads to an investigation by us if there is a problem. I believe we have thrown out schools. Then the results are some what mixed together so that if there is something going on, that lessens any kind of impact.

The other thing that we have done is, basically, we have issued a set of guidelines. For the last six years or four years, we have issued guidelines to schools, basically telling them that they are forbidden from communicating with the graduates about the survey in any way that might suggest gaming. And if they do so, we will throw them right out. And not only throw them out, but we will probably write a story and humiliate and embarrass the school in the magazine. That really does the trick.

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