Financial Times FT 2007 MBA rankings - do they matter?

If you are planning to do an MBA and did your research, you will come across a few well known MBA rankings. The notable ones are Businessweek rankings, The FT ranking and Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) rankings. Of the three the Businessweek and FT rankings have considerable weightage. The EIU rankings are ..well.. strange. I mean, Wharton is no. 17, Harvard is 8, INSEAD is 22...you get the picture.

The Businessweek rankings are significantly US/North America centric (Queens outranks LBS and INSEAD..) whereas FT has a more global approach, and is probably the best mirror to general branding and perceptions. FT rankings are read around the world.

The rankings came out 2 days ago, and for me - it was good news. INSEAD is 7 (though I would have liked us to swap places with LBS. But in terms of 1 year general management programs INSEAD is no.1 in this case) and there were optimistic debates about the future of MBA. This post is not to discuss whether MBA is right etc. but to discuss if rankings matter.

Shoot me if you want to - but yes, they do, and quite a lot. Industry observers, leaders, executives all read these rankings and that creates a perception. This perception perpetuates and has its own power. No amount of reasoning is going to make us agree that some how Wharton is no.17 in the world and Harvard is 6 positions below IESE (no offense to IESE ;) )

Ranking is like a brand - it has its own power and influences potential applicants, recruiters, professors, business leaders and media. A strong rank is self-perpetuating. It creates an aura that a school is strong, therefore well qualified applicants apply, therefore the quality of student pool and eventual alumni is better, therefore recruitment becomes increasingly stronger - and it sustains. An observation will show that the top 10 schools pretty much stay that way (even if they juggle the positions internally within 10) for years and it is unlikely they will suddenly go down.

My own take is that it is important to research your potential schools well and aim higher if you can. It is not sufficient to say "school X has course Y I like and so I'm going to spend 100,000$ going there". It is also important to see what your world looks like after you graduate and 10 years down the line. Where are your potential classmates likely to be and what would they be doing? You want to gain the best mileage out of your MBA and the better the perceived rank of the institute, the better your chances are.

You could argue all you want, but if you were a VP of a company and you had 2 strong candidates - one from Columbia and one from Tchikkakaramba* school of business, the chance that you would lean towards Columbia are greater.

If you have a good background, strong scores, then don't aim too low to start with. Yes, competition is fierce, but how would you know what you can achieve if you did not even try? It may be a good option to mix top schools and some next level schools to achieve balance. I'm not the right one to comment because I only applied to one :P (hey, in my defense, I had very strong reasons. You might find it interesting to know that nearly 40% of INSEAD entrants applied only to INSEAD). A post like this is bound to raise heckles and ire about "stupid ranking nonsense", hey - don't shoot the messenger. It's better to face reality and take it by the horns than pretend it isn't real.

I plan to put another post on why ROI calculations miss what I call as "the flash of opportunity" that can alter our lives. But until then, I have to get cash for the school admission advance. I'm now about to become officially very poor.

(I am a little disappointed that power houses of Indian Business schools - the IIM's -Indian Institutes of Management - made no cut into the list. I do have my own observations on how some IIM statistics are twisted played to the gallery, but even then they are a powerful local brand, have great students and I would think they had some currency outside too. What are they missing so much that they don't make it to the top 100?! There are some areas they hurt - like diversity, experience of incoming class, international experience of class etc... if any IIM student/alumni is reading this - care to comment?)

Epilogue

* You could argue that I valued FT over Businessweek because of the bias that my school ranks higher, you can see for yourself that Canadian schools rank higher than world class European institutes like LBS, IMD and INSEAD and I don't buy that. Flame me.

* There is no Tchikkakaramba school of business anywhere in the world as I know it. But hmm..it sounds nice..I think..