Selections Interview with Joy Sever, Senior Vice President and Director of the Reputation Practice, Harris Interactive

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Selections: What were the goals behind the creation of the Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive business school survey?
Sever: We talked about it in terms of a five-part mission. Most important, it was a study to take a look at business schools from the perspective of recruiters and only from recruiters. We talk about this five-part mission in great detail in the e-book. The e-book only costs $15 and it provides a very, very detailed explanation of our methodology.

Part of our five-part mission was to include as many schools as possible—provided they met the criterion of having at least 50 full-time students. And then to rank them [the schools] on as many criteria as possible, based on the experience of recruiters, and to include as many recruiters as possible. We also wanted to provide information that wasn’t just about ranking schools but actually provide information that schools could use to learn something. We didn’t want to produce a ranking for ranking’s sake but actually get into what is important to recruiters. The fifth part was to be as open as we could on the methodology, which is why there is such a detailed methodology in the e-book.

Selections: I did notice that a lot of information was published on the CareerJournal.com Web site about the methodology, including a response to criticisms.
Sever: When we did our two-year preparation for this, we learned that the schools’ biggest frustration was that they would get ranked and they couldn’t figure out why they were ranked the way they were. They knew it was important, but they felt very powerless to really do anything about it in a real, legitimate way. How could they make themselves a better school if they don’t really know how they got there?

Selections: There are already a number of MBA rankings out there and there are a lot of criticisms of the rankings that do exist now, so why did the Wall Street Journal even want to get into the business of ranking the business schools?
Sever: I’m not sure if you’ll get the same answer, but I’ve heard them answer this question. Being a business publication and based on their readership, they felt this was information that was going to be important to the people who read their paper.

Selections: What was your role with the survey?
Sever: We [Harris Interactive] designed and conducted the survey. We are very much partners in that we copresented at many conferences, and we shared in meetings as we were developing the survey. The Wall Street Journal and Harris Interactive pretty much did things side by side.

Selections: Whom do you consider to be the main stakeholders in this endeavor?
Sever: Recruiters. They were the only stakeholder.

Selections: I know you go into this quite a bit on the CareerJournal.com Web site, as to the many differences between the Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive ranking and the Business Week, U.S. News, and Financial Times rankings, but I wanted to ask you what you consider the most significant differences?
Sever: There are three main differences, and I did write about this for CareerJournal. I wrote about the three questions each of us approach in our surveys in a different way. One is the universe of schools eligible to be rated. We have a broader universe of schools, and what we heard schools talk about in terms of their frustrations was that the same schools [show up on the other surveys] almost year after year. I think their methodologies lend themselves to that, because it’s sort of continuing to go back to schools that had been listed in the previous rankings. When we set out to do this, we cast the net as wide as possible. We said we are going to consider all schools, and then those schools that don’t qualify—because they don’t have enough students—we will remove from the list, as opposed to starting in a more restricted way. So that would be number one.

The second would be the respondents rating the schools. That is very different across all four surveys. We have just recruiters, and you will know from talking to the others that they use other respondents, as well.

The third is the rating criteria. We talked to recruiters to identify what guided them when they go to the schools and decide which type of students to recruit. That was our main focus, and again, that is not what you will find in the other surveys. The other surveys have different components and different percentages attached to those components.

We surveyed more than 1,600 recruiters, and Business Week and U.S. News each survey under 300 for that same component. And Financial Times doesn’t have recruiters surveyed at all.

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