Selections Interview with Gayle Garrett, Project Director, U.S. News & World Report’s Best Graduate Schools Guide

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Selections: When did U.S. News begin ranking business schools, and why did your publication embark on that endeavor?
Garrett: I’ll let Bob [Morse, director of data research at U.S. News] answer the “when” and fill you in on why. I know that one of the things that he will say is that, especially for graduate schools, the intent was to consider those areas where the largest numbers of degrees are awarded. The largest categories are education and business. That has been fairly constant over the past 10 years. Around here, we talk about the “big five”: business, engineering, education, law, and medicine.

Selections: Why did you think it was important to begin offering rankings for these areas?
Garrett: Again, Bob can offer specifics on why we did this. But those are the areas with the largest numbers of consumers of graduate school education. It just makes sense to try to concentrate on giving them information that would be helpful to them in looking at schools and making comparisons and evaluations.

Selections: Speaking specifically about the business school rankings, whom do you believe are your main stakeholders? To whom do you target your work?
Garrett: There are obviously two audiences: the prospective students and the schools. Certainly, the thrust of the guide is for prospective students. These are people who are going to be making decisions, and the choices that are made editorially, and I should say that kind of editorial choice . . . for example, when we look at the guide itself, and we are putting columns of figures on a page and that page is limited. It is the book editor, and that is Anne McGrath, who makes that kind of decision. I might say, “We should include such and such information,” and she would say, “We can put that on the Web, because we have more room on the Web, but I don’t think that is one of the first things that students want to know.” She is the person who makes th decision about what goes on the page.

Selections: There is more expanded information on the Web?
Garrett: Yes.

Selections: So your main audience is the prospective students, correct?
Garrett: Right. Obviously, if you sit in this position, it doesn’t take very long before you realize a lot of the calls you are getting are from schools. And, clearly, schools watch these figures very carefully.

Selections: How should your survey be used and viewed by students and the schools? How should they be using this information?
Garrett: The students don’t see the survey, per se. They see the results. They are presented in the guide, in the magazine, and also on the Web site. The hope is always that students will use . . . particularly the properties of the Web site. I was just cleaning out my office and putting away some information from a focus group that was held last fall, and one of the clear outcomes of that focus group was that mostly people are getting their information from the Web site. And some said that while they will get the guide and thumb through it to look at the tables, that when they get down to the actual ways that we hope they are going to use it—and that is for doing their own comparisons—they will go to the Web site. Part of the reason is that the Web site makes it easy. It does allow you to bring up records of various schools and have the information displayed side by side for up to three schools at any one time.

Selections: So you’re hoping that the prospective students will use this information to make comparisons among the schools that they are interested in, correct?
Garrett: Yes.

Selections: How should schools be using the information that is published in the rankings?
Garrett: What I hope the schools are using the information for is . . .well, I hope they are being very, very careful about the information that they provide us, so that when it comes out on the Web site, they will be taking ownership of it at the beginning of the process rather than at the end. There is usually not a lot of difficulty with the MBA data, in terms of the survey coming out. But one of the things that I think is a matter of concern, and I know that this is also a matter of concern of the AACSB and the [MBA] Career Services Council, and that is . . . all the time we are trying to get clearer and clearer salary data that we publish, and precisely what it means and to which program it applies and for how many graduates it is applicable. As a matter of fact, I just got through revising our survey for this coming fall, and we have always used—in terms of the admissions data—we have always tried to follow the GMAC criteria. And there have been new criteria this year, and I have incorporated those into the new survey. There are also standards for reporting salary data, and those are put out by the MBA Career Services Council. I understand that GMAC is also going to be looking at those, and that there is a new revision coming out. I just made the decision in doing our new survey that we would not ask for any percentages to be provided to us by the schools, rather only exact counts. We will compute our own percents. There has been some misinterpretation in providing percents, in terms of what is the denominator. I have simplified our survey this year by not including all of the forms that the Career Services Council has developed. I have selected from them so that we can concentrate on following the path, first to make very clear that when we publish numbers, these refer to graduates of the full-time program only. That is number one. And number two, that they refer only to the graduates who are job seeking. And then following it all the way down the line so that they have to provide us the number of graduates who provided base salary data . . . the number of graduates who provided signing bonus data. And then for every one of the functional categories, such as how many graduates went into manufacturing, I’m not asking for the percent. They are asked to provide mean, median, high, and low, and I want to know the actual numbers that those statistics are computed on. Eventually, we will be redesigning the Web site, and every time you see a list of those statistics, you will see exactly how many students are involved there. That is very important. Right now, the instructions say, “At least three students or 1 percent of the graduates.” Well, if you have a high, low, and median for three students, that is very different [from] if you have it for 30 students. And so by having that right alongside, it will immediately say to whoever looks at it, “Oh, that is interesting information, but it is not based on a very big group.”

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