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Selections Interview with Jennifer Merritt, Management Education Editor, Business Week
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.
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.
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. [See elaboration following transcript.]
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.
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.
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.”
© Selections: Fall 2001