Selections Interview with Jennifer Merritt, Management Education Editor, Business Week

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Selections: Why does Business Week rank business schools? What are the goals behind this effort?
Merritt: My goals are to follow through on what [Business Week Senior Editor] John Byrne started, which is to hold business schools accountable to their customers, which are the students who attend the schools and the companies that hire those graduates.

Selections: But why do you think it is Business Week’s role to make sure that business schools are accountable to their customers?
Merritt: I don’t know if you could say that it is our role, but it is something that we have taken on. And that is the role of journalism, which is to provide information and to put things out there that hold people accountable for their actions. You know, we write crime stories at newspapers or whatnot, and that is to get the information out there and basically say, here is what happened, here’s who did it, and here is what is going to happen to them or here is the accountability. And I think it is just an extension of the role of being a journalist and being in journalism, and it is an extension of the public service [of journalism] at a different level.

Selections: Whom do you believe are the main stakeholders in this endeavor? Who is the main audience for this work?
Merritt: The main audience should be, or primarily consists of, people looking to go to business schools, those who are thinking about getting an MBA. The secondary audience is made up of those people who have already gotten an MBA or currently attend one of these schools. And, of course, the business schools themselves look at it, but if you’re thinking about who is getting this information, who is using this information the most, it is probably the prospective students. Of course, there are always those schools, and they often want to have more information about where their schools fell in the rankings and whatnot.

Selections: How should your survey be viewed—as well as used—by students and then by the schools?
Merritt: I think it should be used as a tool, and it should be viewed as a tool. I’ll start with the schools, because this is something that I personally feel strongly about. We started hearing a couple of years ago about people being fired after the rankings came out, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. That is not the role of the Business Week rankings of the MBA programs. Deans should use this to kind of figure out, Is this something we didn’t know? Is there something the students told Business Week that they didn’t tell us? And if so, they need to look at it for themselves. Not just make changes based on the Business Week survey, and Business Week wouldn’t want them to do that. Business Week would want them to be smart about it and to think about it.

And for students, this is a big decision. They are going to spend a lot of money going to school, and they should, one, see who is doing the best job at what. We try to provide that in a lot of tables and whatnot. And then we put out the book that goes into all of the in-depth profiles of all of the schools. Students can use this information as a starting base, along with any other rankings that they might want to look at, and then do their own homework. But it is a good place to start. If you’re going to spend that much money, you should try to figure out who is doing the best job. I hope we’re putting the information out there that students need. We put so much of it online. It’s really interactive, and you can compare anything you want, practically. In that sense, the rankings are just the tip of the iceberg. It is the just start of this vast amount of information that we put out there. Really, some people joke that it’s free publicity for the schools. But that is not the intent. The intent is for us to serve the people who want the information.

Selections: Going back to the remark you made about administrators being fired after a school falls in the rankings, how do you think the survey went from just providing this information on schools to something that is so influential that deans would take such aggressive actions?
Merritt: I think there are two things. I think that starts happening when you hold people accountable. I think that if you compare it to, say, a newspaper writing a story about a developer who is not building to the same quality as the next builder, it’s not low quality, it’s just not the same quality as his competitor. But no one ever knows that until somebody wrote a story about it. Then things naturally happen after that. Then the people in the community that the business school serves start to demand more accountability and changes. And then there are schools that I think are obsessed with this. And I think that accountability can turn into an obsession. And when that happens, it is not good for the schools. It is not good for the students. And changes made solely based on where you fell in the rankings, that is not serving your school well, because it is not coming from the right place. And I think it goes awry. I also think that the measures that other rankings use often contribute to that as well, like test scores and whatnot. That is why we don’t use measures like that. We don’t think things like test scores are a measure of a good school.

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