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

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Selections: Harris Interactive will do customized reports based on this information?
Sever: Yes.

Selections: How much do those reports cost?
Sever: There is a range in prices. It costs $2,000 for a summary report. These contain information that cover the whole recruiting world in general. It’s not specific to any one school. And then there is the $6,000 package, which includes a profile report on that particular school and the summary report. It’s a package of two reports, and it’s everything we have about that school. So if a school were rated by 40 recruiters, other than the identity of the recruiters, the school pretty much finds out what industries they come from and what is important to them, what they said about the schools. We’ve sold reports, and in every case when we take a look at these findings, I really have come to learn something about the schools that really comes out of this. It is very rich. They also get any student responses that pertain to their school. And it’s questions like, What can the school do to improve its reputation? Then there is a package of reports called the “comparison set,” where a school is able to pick a minimum of five schools as a comparison set and we aggregate the findings and present that aggregate as a comparison to the schools. So, they can see what recruiters who are rating the comparison set had to say. This way, they can see where there are gaps in perceptions, and that can tell them where maybe there is some gap that they need to close. That is $10,000.

Selections: How many of those reports have you sold?
Sever: I don’t want to give a specific number, but it’s enough that we know we are providing something useful. And we didn’t attempt to try to sell a lot of them. This is a very sensitive area. Schools are not used to paying this amount of money for this information. We priced these much less than we would for an equivalent report for a corporation. We know what we need to do in terms of the amount of work. We also prepared the reports at the requests of the schools. We didn’t go into this intending to sell reports. But there is so much information, and when we would meet with the schools, they would ask to get their data. So, we met with schools and worked our way to a price we felt schools might be comfortable with. We’ve had schools buy from the top [of the rankings] all the way to bottom. So, it’s not only schools at the top and not only schools at the bottom. It ranges from schools in the top 10 to schools ranked close to 50.

Selections: Do you expect to conduct this ranking again?
Sever: Yes, we are conducting it again. We haven’t released our intended released date. We have contacted all of the schools and sent them a business school help kit. We’ve heard that schools get asked to participate in around 20 different surveys. We have given them a very detailed schedule of what we will need from them and when we will be contacting them. The interviewing will begin later this year and go into February. We will analyze the data, and the results will be published sometime next year.

Selections: When you first approached the schools with the news that the Wall Street Journal was doing a different kind of ranking, what kind of reaction did you get?
Sever: Mixed. It was like, “Oh, no, another ranking.” Positive because we were addressing something that had been neglected. And very positive when they saw our approach to this. And schools came away—at least they told us—very impressed with how detailed we were and how careful we were in conducting this. We wouldn’t have done this if we hadn’t received their support. If we had received negative reactions, we wouldn’t have done it.

Selections: Do you consider the other rankings out there to be competition?
Sever: I think other people put them in that category, but they are very, very different surveys.

Selections: What do you think the future holds for business school rankings in general and the Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive ranking in particular?
Sever: We have made the commitment to do it for a second year. We want to enhance areas that we can enhance. So, as certain possibilities are now made real, we can now do things that we couldn’t do in the first year, because either we’re more known or the technology allows us to do it. We want to make it better and provide more information. And we hope schools will learn from this. We want to provide something that is meaningful.

Selections: Do you anticipate trying to find a way to include input from the students or the schools themselves?
Sever: We’ve talked about extending this, but I don’t know if that is the first place we would turn in enhancing this. The amount of work and the amount of time that we devote to this . . . It took us two years to do this one. It will be less than two years for the next one. But I think we want to make sure we’ve got the routine and procedures and everything figured out here before we were to introduce another one. I think we’ll stick with this one for a while. But we have talked about ways to enhance it or extend it, add other elements.

Whatever may not be perfect about our survey, at least we are very open, so that the schools can evaluate what we’ve done. And we are very “out there.”

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