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

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

<-- Previous page | Next page -->

Selections: You publish the results of the b-school rankings in the magazine. In what other ways do you publish your ranking results?
Merritt: We publish a book that includes in-depth profiles of all of the schools, so what is in the book is much more expansive than what is published in the magazine. For prospective students, the book is probably the real tool, because it tells them all about the curriculum, the classes they can take, plus the environment of the school. You know, where people go and hang out on Thursday nights. What the dean is like. It is more of an “everything you want to know about business schools” kind of book, and it includes tips to get in and things like that. It costs $16.95.

We’re in the seventh print edition, and it’s now available online as an e-book. You can pick and choose what you want to read, or you can get the whole thing. I don’t have any idea how many books have been sold. That is done through our book company. It is a very unusual arrangement. Business Week does not publish the book. It is published by McGraw-Hill Publications. You can call them, and they will have that information. My understanding is that the book is not really a money maker. But I personally don’t care about that. My goal is to get all of this information out there, and if we can cover our costs, that is great. I don’t really think about it.

If you think about it, in any given year how many people apply to business schools? It’s something like perhaps 60,000, 70,000, 80,000, depending on the year. Sometimes upwards of 100,000, as far as I can tell, if you’re looking worldwide. So, only a portion of those people are going to come out and buy the book, if you think about it logically. And the book is only now starting to be sold internationally more heavily.

And then we also have a tremendous amount of data online, including all of the data the schools provide us about admissions and whatnot.

Selections: How do your rankings impact Business Week magazine sales?
Merritt: I know it is not the top seller. I know it is a good seller. I know there are several other covers that come out yearly that are much better sellers than the business school ranking issue. I have no idea.

Selections: How much does your Web traffic spike the day the rankings are released online?
Merritt: I don’t know exactly how much it spiked. I do believe the general traffic to the b-school site is double or triple what it normally is for a few days after the survey comes out. I know the day of [the releasing of the survey results] and the day after, it’s usually three to four times as great. And the weekend after, it is usually double what a weekend is.

Selections: When that information is released online, do people need to be Business Week subscribers to access the information?
Merritt: No. For the countdown part, where we do the countdown of the rankings, you just have to make up a log on for yourself beforehand.

Selections: What are the most significant ways you see the Business Week rankings in particular, and business school rankings in general, having an impact on graduate management education?
Merritt: I had a dean and a few professors I was talking to last week tell me that business schools have improved tremendously since the rankings started, since the Business Week ranking started. I think that is the impact of whenever you hold someone accountable, they are going to get better. I think that perhaps it has caused business schools to sort of think more about what the students really need and remain academically sound. But also make sure they are getting the training the companies need. It also causes business schools to up the ante on their customer service and to consider people customers. To consider their students customers, and to consider the companies they work with to be customers. Those relationships have been strengthened, and I think that a lot of schools probably have seen those stronger relationships translate into partnerships and more donations. And when it’s time to build a new facility, those companies are behind them. And I think that, in that sense, it has helped business schools.

In the sense of the students, I think that business schools are really starting to move in unison toward a more team-oriented, work-together approach. Obviously, that started with [Kellogg Dean] Don Jacobs in the 1970s. But when we first did this, John Byrne tells me this story about a dean who told him about a conversation where he basically said, “Teamwork? Well, at my school we call that cheating.” He tells me that story, but most schools have now moved toward that, because that is what the corporate world wants. The corporate world doesn’t want sharp elbows. They want people who know how to work with each other and know how to work with a diverse group of people. The truth is that the MBA classroom is probably the most diverse place these people will ever see, because if you look at your workplace, it’s not as diverse as a business school classroom. And yet you can work with people with different personalities. The advent of the rankings forced business schools to take a good look at what they were, what their mission really was, who their customers were, and then to kind of fine-tune—not retool—but fine-tune everything they were already doing right in order to meet the needs of all of those constituencies.

Selections: Do you see any negative impact?
Merritt: I see the negative impact being the ranking obsession. But I can’t do anything about that. I wish it wasn’t that way, but I think that is a school-by-school kind of thing. The other negative that you could say exists is perhaps some people . . . and this is a negative and a positive. Business schools have become more competitive because of this, as far as admissions go, because more students want to go to something that they can say is in the top 10 or top 20. I think we have done a good job, because we have put out this book that gives you the profiles on almost all of the schools that we survey, and I think that is the kind of information that the students need to look for, not just the ranking number. So, I think that if there is any negative of the ranking, it can be the obsession by the different constituencies. They don’t understand what the ranking is.

Selections: What are the biggest challenges you face in conducting your rankings?
Merritt: It’s incredibly time consuming. I’m a perfectionist. And I want to make sure that every number is checked 10 times over by more than several people. So, it is a huge undertaking. The biggest challenge in terms of collecting the data is making sure we have a wide range of companies. That is very important to us. We make a lot of personal phone calls to companies. We try to tell them about why we are doing this and how important it is to just complete the survey, and in general, we are successful with that. That is probably the most difficult part of what we do.

<-- Previous page | Next page -->

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5