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

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Selections: What is that percentage?
Merritt: We’ve lowered it over the years. It’s approximately 20 percent. It can vary, because that does not apply to non-U.S. schools. That is for the U.S. schools. Before you print that, can you let me talk to John Byrne about it, because I haven’t had to make a choice. I need to check on that. [See elaboration following transcript.]

And then you have to have a percent, which I also need to get verified, of students coming from outside of your area. For example, a small school that has an MBA program that attracts people only from 50 miles around it is not . . . first of all, probably wouldn’t have the international student body, but second of all, probably would not have any variation in the kinds of people that come to the program. If you’re in the middle of a town of factories, you’re probably going to be getting a lot of those folks coming in. But we think a good business school also has a variety of people from different areas in and outside the country. I need to check on the percentage, but I believe it’s at least half. [See elaboration following transcript.]

Then finally, let’s say you meet all of the criteria, but you still haven’t been on the Business Week list. So, how do you get onto the Business Week list? Well, there are a couple of ways. We have some flexibility in this area. The first way we take on new schools to the list is through write-ins by companies. When we send the surveys to corporations, they have room to write in schools we don’t include on the list. Anyone who makes those lists automatically gets a look from us. They don’t automatically get in, but they are automatically contacted for information about their school. If they meet those first criteria that I mentioned to you, then we ask for more information about their programs, et cetera. Some of it through corporate word of mouth. They [the corporate recruiters] are finding that they are getting good students from these schools. That is the most common way that a new school is added to the list. The other way is when we start hearing a lot about a school. Not just about their research or whatnot, because they have PR machines that put out those kinds of things. We’re talking about serious programs.

One example is the University of Connecticut. They have never been on our survey before, but they have really done some innovative things with their program, and they have had a lot of corporate partners who have come in, and their students are doing some really cool things. So, they are in consideration for the next Business Week survey. I think they were also written in a couple times this year, but they hadn’t been in the past. And it takes time for that to catch up. Companies hear about them, and then companies start going there. Then, it all kind of goes in a cycle like that.

Selections: You began ranking international schools with the 2000 survey. How did you determine which international schools to include?
Merritt: I have to be honest, I was not around during the selection process. I will gladly contact the person who was here before me and selected those schools and find out from her. In the future, the way I think it is going to work is very similar to what I mentioned for the U.S. schools. You have to be accredited by one of the three main business school accrediting bodies. You have to have a certain number of students. And international schools have to have a certain percentage of students from outside their country. And I think those are going to be the basic criteria. We got a lot of international write-ins this year. Since we are going to expand that the most of all the next time around, that is where you will see the most activity and where we will gather the most information on different programs. And we have been. We’ve been asking for information on programs.

Selections: I know there is some criticism of using student input, essentially because these students can’t provide an objective comparison, given that they have only attended one program. How do you respond to that, and why do you think it is still very important to have student feedback account for so much of the ranking?
Merritt: I’ve heard that a lot. But let’s think about it. You’re only going to go to one school. So if we take out the student criteria, then we’ve basically got a corporate survey, and we don’t think that is appropriate. We think that these students are savvy enough . . . Oh, I’m sorry, there is one more criterion, and that is you must have below a certain percentage of students with less than one year of work experience. I will have to make sure that still applies. Students at the business schools have . . . they have an average of four and a half years’ work experience. They’ve been to an undergraduate program and know what those teachers are like. They’ve probably even been to some executive education and corporate training during their four or five years out in the work world. When they come to business school, they know what they are going there for. It is competitive to get in, and they have to show that they knew what they wanted this MBA for. They are not dumb. They are not unsavvy customers. They have some expectations. You can’t judge where you haven’t been, so we ask them only about their schools. All we ask them about is their schools. How would you judge the quality of the teaching at your school, not at your competitor’s school? We feel they are the best judges of their own experience. And we also feel that they are smart enough and savvy enough to be fair. I think we have found that to be true. If you don’t have student input, then you don’t know if they consider what they are learning to be valuable. They’ve also had their internships. They’ve gone through that first year where they were taught the basics and then had an internship where they had to apply what they learned at school. By the time they graduate, they know if they will be prepared for the job they are about to take. These folks aren’t just taking the first job offer they get. They are researching, they are studying, they know what their responsibilities are going to be and whether or not they think they can do it. Our feeling is that without them, we don’t have anything.

Selections: I know that student input is really what sets your ranking apart from the others out there. Has there been any evidence of students being coached by their schools? What steps do you take to prevent that?
Merritt: If that happens, we would eliminate the school from the ranking. It did happen in 1998, and there were several schools that were penalized. Some of it was from the administration, and some of it was from the student groups who were trying to tell others how to fill out the survey. When we find proof and investigate it . . . you have to understand, this takes up a lot of our time, safeguarding against cheating. Let’s come right out and say it, it’s cheating. And to be completely honest, any school that would advocate this, even in a subtle way, I question the ethics that they are teaching their students. These are the future leaders of the business world. If you’re going to teach them that it is okay to fudge on a Business Week survey, not only are you doing your school a disservice, but basically you just produced a class of people who fudge on their ethics. And that is something that I stress to people.

We have gotten very strict on it. If we see a sign of it and we do an investigation and there is some proof that there was some effort to game the rankings on the part of a student group or on the part of faculty or administration, we will eliminate the school from the ranking. In 1998, the schools [five schools found to have influenced students in how they filled out the survey] were just penalized. We do an extensive quality control resurvey, where we ask in confidence a portion of the students who answered the survey whether or not any of this occurred. We have had to take a hard line on that. At the same time, even if people are not fessing up to cheating, we hired—at a high expense—some statisticians to come in and clean through our data and tell us whether or not there looks to be some kind of problem, such as some school having all 10s on their surveys. Or, is the data spread the way it should be in a normal way. And so, actually, we found that after 1998—so for this last year, 2000—we had a greater differential in our data than we have ever had. So, I think people will get away with what they can get away with, and if they know they can’t get away with it, they won’t do it.

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