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

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Selections: Are you finding that obsession grips schools at the top, as well as at the bottom of the ranking?
Merritt: It depends on the leadership, to be honest about it. It depends on whether the leadership of the school is obsessed with being number 1 or obsessed with improving their school, regardless of their ranking. There are schools in the 20s or schools that have fallen out of the top 30 that feel internally that they are doing a great job themselves and they are striving internally for their students or their alumni. And so I think the tone for that is set by the leadership. You could have a school in the top 5 that might act that way and also in the bottom 5.

Selections: John Byrne did walk me through how the Business Week ranking was started and how he developed the methodology. How much has the methodology—including the weighting system—changed since it was first started in 1988?
Merritt: I started doing this with last ranking, although I worked on this as an intern years ago. It hasn’t changed since then, but the first few cycles, because we went to the three-class weighting versus just using one class’s responses, that was a progressive change, because the first year we didn’t have responses from multiple graduating classes. The only change that has happened any time recently is that just this last year we added a measure of a school’s intellectual output. That was something that the senior-level editors at Business Week felt was important, because they felt like we were missing another customer of the business schools, and that is you and me. Or practitioners, I should say. The consultants, the accountants, the CFOs. We were missing the information that business schools put out there that shaped the way those people do things. And, of course, it usually takes several incarnations. So it may start out in the journals, but then that journal is read by someone who writes for a practitioner’s journal. And then a story is written there. Then ultimately, that knowledge becomes a part of what is going on in practice. So, we added this measure but we wanted to keep it a small percentage of the ranking. Its weight is only 10 percent. And the reason for that is because we think [the practitioner] is the lesser customer in the equation. The students and the companies are really the main customers of the business schools.

We also wanted to add a third component, because many academic surveys and many rankings usually use three components. And one component is static, and that is how research can be measured, sort of as that static component. It is important to include that third customer, but it is also important to make sure we have something that is easily measurable, unlike the satisfaction ratings, which are a little harder to measure. We have 45 percent go to the student ranking. And that breaks down in that half of that 45 percent is based on the current year’s students’ scores and 25 percent each on the two years before.

Selections: In measuring intellectual capital, you give extra points for books that are reviewed in your own publication?
Merritt: Yes, we give extra points for books reviewed in Business Week, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Those were bonus points toward the scores, but honestly, there were very few. You got certain points for long and short articles in the journals, and then you got extra points for having your book reviewed in Business Week, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal—whether the book review was good or bad. If it’s been reviewed, it’s gotten some notoriety. And the point is, if it got that much notoriety, that means people are out there reading it. One way or another, it’s had some impact. If the book made the Business Week bestseller list, then you got additional points. And again, there were few.

Selections: That seems a bit biased to me.
Merritt: Nobody else is doing that kind of business book bestseller list. It’s not like being on the New York Times bestseller list; that uses different criteria. We will keep doing that. There are very few . . . really most of those books are . . . I don’t feel like it’s biased at all. The Business Week bestseller list isn’t based on people here saying these are the best books. It’s based on other people outside of here reading those books.

Selections: You said the ranking is based 50 percent on responses from the current graduating class and 25 percent on responses from the survey before that, and 25 percent on responses from the survey before that. What is the logic behind that?
Merritt: Any school can have a one-year blip. If you think about it, let’s say you didn’t do so well in 1998. Well, there are many different kinds of things you could do to make people feel better about the teaching of this, that, or the other. And it could be very temporary. And so to measure a school over one time period when you have data from years and years past, we think it is better to measure a school over time. And so, if you have six classes’ worth of data, you can also see schools slide up and down based on that. Let’s say your school is ranked really low by students in 1996 and then did better in 1998 and even better in 2000. If you do even better in 2002, that first score is going to fall off and that gradual improvement is going to show. Whereas, you could have one bad year. There are two schools, for example, where the dean had died, and that usually means faculty end up leaving, and things can be in a bit of disarray until they find a new leader. If we measured a school on only that year, they probably wouldn’t do as well, but that might not be a true glimpse at the quality of the education that students are receiving. But to go back several cycles, I think you get a better-rounded view of what is going on.

Selections: What is the typical sample size for your survey? How many schools, recruiters, and students?
Merritt: Do you have the last magazine? We put those numbers in there. In 1998, we went from doing a sample from each class to surveying every graduate. And it’s all done online since 1998.

Selections: How do you decide which set of schools to focus on in the rankings?
Merritt: There are several criteria, some of which I will share with you now. One of them is accreditation. You have to be an accredited business school. Number two, we require that you have at least 50 students per graduating class, and that is a number that has been provided by the folks who do our statistics as a credible amount of responses. You have to look at the entire scale, and if you go below 50, then let’s say you got 50 percent responses, and you have 20 responses. And 20 people are judging one school, whereas 100 might be judging the other schools. We have to have some viable, statistical ways to balance the numbers. So, those are the two main things.

And then you have to have a certain percentage of your students coming from out of the country. We believe a good business school has some global aspect to it.

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