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

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Selections: How do you determine which recruiters to talk to?
Merritt: There are several ways. We ask every school to give us the names of the companies that are both hiring the most people and an additional list of companies that they feel are important to their school. That means they may have hired one person or hired no people. But they are still seen as important. Then we take every school’s list and combine it, so that gets rid of a lot of duplicates. Then we go through our own internal effort, that is very time consuming as well, to find a central contact in the company. There is one particular person that we contact in a company, unless its recruiting is decentralized. And we are not prepared to say what level of person we contact, because we don’t want there to be any introduction of cheating in that realm. And then we send the survey to them. That is not the end of it, though, because a company’s survey can still be discarded. The reason that might happen is because the company has to have experience recruiting at least three business schools in order to be kept in our survey. Now the reason for that is, think about the start-up craze. We tried to include more start-ups or young companies in our survey. If you are a Stanford graduate and you go out and start a company, and you only hire Stanford graduates, yes, you recruited at Stanford, but you don’t have any other experience at any other schools. We also ask the recruiters if they have an MBA and from where. Although for the most part that doesn’t end up affecting their answers, or at least we have found no correlation. But we ask them to tell us how many schools they are familiar with recruiting at or have experience recruiting, and they check off on the list. They can also write in schools. But if they don’t have three schools, then they are eliminated.

Selections: Are you concerned about the proliferation of rankings by various publications, and do you consider those other rankings to be competition?
Merritt: The only reason that I feel concerned is because I think that some of them do a disservice to the business schools and the business school community. And the reason is—and this is my point of view and not necessarily Business Week’s point of view, and I have made this clear at conferences that I have spoken at—I think that when you use things like test scores and endowments and GPA and things like that to judge a school, you are not judging the quality of the school, you are judging how well people take tests or how well they raise money. I think that what that does is put pressure on the schools to admit people only under certain standards, and I don’t think that is right. You could have someone with a 520 GMAT score who would add so much to your school and whom you could add so much to as a business person, and schools feel pressured not to take someone they know would fit in well in their community and add to their community because of that.

The other concern that Business Week has is that when you have so many different rankings, you confuse people. And I think that if you can do a good job of doing a ranking, more power to you. It’s competition, in one sense. But really, it is not, because we all do it differently. Everyone has a different philosophy. Ours is customer service-based. U.S. News, as I understand it, is more statistically score based. The Financial Times does a combination of things that are somewhat similar to us and somewhat similar to U.S. News. So, it’s not so much a concern about the competition, because I think we each have different strengths because we have different ways of doing things. But more of a concern about watering down the whole ranking idea. My concern about new rankings entering the market all the time is, Are they adding value? This is a huge task to take on, and in this job, half of the people hate you and half of the people love you. And at any given time, that population can change from one side to the other. And this is a very big, serious responsibility. So, you don’t come into this lightly, and if you don’t believe in it, you can’t do it. You can’t come in and do this job if you don’t believe in the way we do it. So, I think that Business Week is respected for being customer-oriented and for not putting schools in the position where they have to take only a certain student body within a certain range of scores. And in that sense, I feel that Business Week does some good in that way. We don’t penalize the school for not having as money much as another school or for taking a student who is bright but doesn’t test well. And I think that is important.

Selections: Is there a process for responding to criticisms by the schools?
Merritt: Anyone who calls me gets a call back. I spend a lot of time after the rankings going through these things. We don’t give schools their specific scores. But we will tell people how they compared to their peers, whether they were near the top of the list or the bottom of the list. And even though the questions allow answers in a range of 1 to 10, nobody really scores below a 6 or vice versa. So, we will tell them that “While you didn’t do as well as your peer group, your students did not rank you negatively.” Because if you think about it, if you’re the best business school, naturally you are going to have higher scores, so at that level, you wouldn’t expect a lot of 2s or 3s or 1s.

Selections: Over the years, have you changed your methodology on the basis of feedback from schools or companies?
Merritt: We have not changed the methodology, except in the ways that I mentioned. We have added some questions to the ranking. In 1998, we started asking more about technology and entrepreneurship. Those are the two areas where we have added questions. But I feel I can safely say that very little has changed except we have tried to keep up with the times.

Selections: What do you think the future holds for business school rankings in general and the Business Week survey in particular?
Merritt: I think that, in general, it will go back to having kind of a few major publications doing rankings. Not everyone will stay in this. It is a very difficult thing to do, and it is a very difficult thing to do right and to add value. I think there will be publications that will think, “You know what? I’m not really adding value. So, I think it will level off some.” For Business Week in particular, we are going to stay the course, and we are going to try to see where else we can add value. We don’t want to mess with what we are doing very much, as far as changing methodologies or whatnot. Part of what makes Business Week so respected in the business school rankings world is that we don’t change things. The first major change that we made since 1988 is to add intellectual capital, and in doing so, we made it a very small part. We may try to look at other programs that we have gotten information on, but essentially we want to stay the course. And also, we always want to be aware of changes going on in the industry that might affect what we are doing, and we will respond to them as appropriate. That is the best way I can answer that.

I just want to reiterate that I feel strongly that every constituency that is looking at the rankings—from prospective students to people who have already gotten their MBAs to the school deans to people who support business schools monetarily—you have to look at them as a tool and not as good or evil, and not use them for justification for this or that. You have to use them as perhaps a starting point to do your own reflection. All of these schools are great. They all are doing a great job, and what I don’t want to see is that business schools start conforming to what they think is going to get them higher in any particular ranking. I think that has already happened some, and that is disappointing to me. I hope that stops. I hope that the leadership at the schools will look at these as a great tool and not as a bible.

Following her interview, Ms. Merritt supplied the following corrections and elaborations to her statements via e-mail.

Regarding criteria for selecting schools for the Business Week rankings:

“When considering schools for ranking, the majority of the time we look for schools with 20% or more international students (this applies to U.S. schools more than non-U.S.). So, it is a rule of thumb, but it is a general guideline and there can be exceptions, though they are rare. That’s true for all of the general guidelines (for example, Canadian schools are considered for the non-U.S. ranking because they haven’t been deregulated long enough for AACSB accreditation. Nearly all of the time, schools must be accredited by AACSB or a similar body).

“The same applies to the geographic region (specifically for U.S. schools). We prefer that more than half a school's students come from outside the school’s region (for example, Stanford has 67% of students from California, but only about 30% from Northern California. Smaller, regional schools may draw only from their immediate area, which would not make for a good comparison with schools that have a diverse draw). Again, this is for consideration of new schools being added.”

Regarding the selection of international schools for the Business Week rankings:

“The international selection required schools have an acceptance rate of less than 45%, that each MBA class have 50 or more students, and that the school be accredited by Equis, AACSB, or some similar accrediting body (as I mentioned, the Canadian school issue). There were some other less concrete criteria that I was unable to get specifics about, but as with including any new school, the process is mostly objective but at the end there is sometimes a judgment call to be made.”

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