MBA Rankings: Do (and Should) they matter when it comes to deciding what MBA Programs to apply to?
Maria |
July 23, 2021

So you’ve finally made the big decision.

You’ve worked hard at your job for a few years, had some highs and lows, gained invaluable experiences, and are ready to take the big plunge. You’ve decided that this is the year you’re going to apply to business schools, get into a great MBA program, and sky-rocket your career.

What’s left now? Well just taking the GMAT if you haven’t, and writing a few essays, right? Sure, there’s some effort you have to put into the process but at least there’s no further decision making involved… right? 

Wrong. 

Before you write a single word of any essay, comes the biggest and most crucial decision every MBA applicant has to make…

Deciding which schools to apply to.

 

“Why is that a big decision?” I hear you ask. “I’ll just go online and check out the most reputed rankings. All I have to do then is apply to the top programs; I’m aiming for the best!”

Except if that’s the philosophy you’re following, you might be aiming for the “best”, but you’re unlikely to be identifying the best for you.

“But rankings are made by considering all the key metrics which determine how great a school is and how awesome I’m going to be if I graduate from it, so why shouldn’t I just apply to the top 5 schools?!”

Okay, okay, we hear you. We understand that top ranking publications such as US News, The Financial Times, The Economist, Poets & Quants, Forbes, and others make very compelling arguments about why their rankings are accurate. And it’s also very easy to get caught up in wanting to go to the most “prestigious” program possible (especially if you’re a member of the MBA Applicants Bowl on Fishbowl or a reader of r/mba on Reddit – sometimes it seems like ONLY rankings matter to people there.) 

Here’s a thought to consider though: every year you hear about applicants with a 4.0 GPA, 780 GMAT, incredible work experience at the best companies who apply to top schools and get rejected. They’ve got everything a school needs, so why can’t they get in?

One simple answer, subjectivity. 

Think of it like this – Imagine you’ve decided to go out for a nice dinner on a Friday night. You open your phone, and check out the reviews for restaurants in the area. You get a list of the best ones: a few pizza places, a new burger joint, a fine-dining French restaurant and many more.

Would you straight away pick the one with the highest rating? Of course not! You’d look at the cuisine and whether it’s to your liking, you’d see how far it is and whether you like the location. You’d probably want to know what the vibe and crowd of the place is like to make sure you’ll actually have a good time!

The same concept applies when you’re deciding which schools to apply to.

Admission committees don’t just look at numbers and grades, they look at people. They want to find the right people who will contribute to their community and cohorts, and fit in with the value system that they have built and maintained over decades. In doing so, their method of selection looks deeper into you as a person, and if that fit does not seem honest, they’re unlikely to offer you a place. (See our post “Admissions Committees Have Needs” for more on this.)

Lack of understanding about a school’s fit and values also comes across very clearly in your application to experienced AdCom members. Generic talk about your interest in a school based only on rankings looks radically different from well researched perspectives about fitting in with a school. Think about it yourself, which would you prefer out of two essays; one which just talks about X being a great program, or one which talks about specific program elements, interactions with alumni and faculty, and goals aligned with the school’s mission?

 

The exact same logic applies from an applicant’s perspective as well!

While applying to schools without the right fit not only reduces your chances of securing an admit (as we just discussed above), even if you do get in, you might fail to make the most of your MBA experience. Not every highly ranked program can lead you to the career that you dream of, and there’s nothing worse than going through an entire MBA and ending up feeling unfulfilled at the end of it.

Want more proof?

Here’s the story of one of our ApplicantLab candidates, who had unsuccessfully applied to the M7 schools in Round 1 last year, without much reasoning for this decision beyond the fact that they were the most renowned programs. Come Round 2, he took on our advice about selecting schools and had this to say,

“I would like to say that I realised by attending an MBA fair at Paris that I should have listened to you at the beginning when you advised me to apply to “lower ranked” schools. I got along with Cornell, Duke, and Tuck people at this event and realised that it’s more about the fit between me and the program than just a question of ranking.

I took the decision to apply at Cornell because I really liked the school and the culture. I think that if I don’t get an offer there I will reapply and put all my focus on those schools instead of aiming at just higher ranked programs.”

So that’s what he did. Took the time to find the schools that worked the best for his profile and interests, and found Cornell to be the ideal choice. What happened next you ask?

*drumroll*

He was not only accepted to Cornell but was awarded a $50,000 scholarship!!! 😊

And it’s worthwhile to note that his pure stats weren’t all that “impressive” — in fact, his GMAT (650) was well below Cornell’s median GMAT of 700! 

By demonstrating fit and passion for the program, he was not only to secure a seat, but wowed the AdCom enough that they decided that they wanted to recruit HIM with the scholarship. 

 

Circling back to the start of this discussion it’s crucial to now understand that unlike students and schools, rankings do not have subjective elements. They have to use standardized metrics as a base for comparison, that’s literally how statistics work! 

 

So we’ve been hating on rankings for a while now, but that’s not to say they don’t serve any purpose. In fact, rankings can be a very useful starting point, especially for those who are completely new to the world of business schools and admissions. A few genuinely useful reasons you should check out school rankings include:

  • Learning about schools: We don’t blame you if you’ve only ever heard of Harvard or Stanford –  we all start somewhere! Going through the top 50 schools ranked by various publications can help you become aware about which are the top schools in the world, along with their basic details such as location, program length etc. 
  • Understanding averages: Rankings often also provide basic information about MBA programs such as the median GMAT score, and years of work experience. While there are always exceptions, it’s always better to know whether you’re close to the averages or significantly away from them.

 

Every cohort at every business school will always have exceptions; students who defy everything we’ve described above and managed to secure an admit at a “top ranked” school. But when it’s your own applications at stake, why risk taking a shot in the dark just based on a list prepared by someone else?

To conclude, MBA rankings are certainly a good starting point for prospective applicants looking to identify schools to apply to. But they should under no circumstances be the start AND end of your research. Make sure you do the legwork, speak to the right people, understand yourself and the schools, and then get started with the right applications!

P.S. Convinced by what we’ve said but confused about how to do your research and decide on which schools to apply to? We’ve got more advice on this in the Lab – start your free trial now to check everything out! 

 

Admissions Chances | Application Tips | General | MBA Admissions Advice
MBA Rankings: Do (and Should) they matter when it comes to deciding what MBA Programs to apply to?
Maria |
July 23, 2021

Video transcript, for you skimmers out there: 

I love the fact that they. Report on this metric, right? The salary percentage increase, I think is an incredibly valuable metric because there are so many business schools out there that are great for so many people. And at the end of the day, these programs are in fact able to do what a lot of business school applicants are hoping for.

They are in fact able to provide a real change in the trajectory of someone’s career. They are, in fact, able to help people leapfrog. Into a higher career stratum than they would’ve otherwise been able to be in. So from that perspective, I love the fact that the FT reports on the salary percentage increase.

So valuable. I think it helps, when sometimes I talk to people at the beginning of the business school journey, I will frequently hear something like, well, it’s M seven or bust, you know, it’s Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or bust.

And I’m often like, look, slow your roll, man. There are so many programs out there that are going to get you. They might not be the first ones that you think [00:01:00] of, but wow, does that even matter? I mean, whew. Look at some of these numbers. $170,000. That is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it’s one and a half times more than what you were making before business school.

I mean, wow. , That is life changing. , And these schools can really change people’s lives. And I think it’s important to have this metric available because I think it helps open people’s eyes. To, To be a little bit more open-minded. , And I think that’s wonderful.

Where my little quibble is. Is that I believe this is an important metric to report upon. However, I do not believe that it is a metric that should have significant amount of weight in the rankings because if we think about what is the purpose of a ranking, it is meant to be some sort of a representation of relative quality.

Now rankings. The entire concept of them is flawed the entire, for me, the entire concept of an ordinal ranking is ridiculous. Like school versus two versus four, versus seven versus six . You know, like, there, there’s sort of [00:02:00] these tiny miniature marginal differences. I think that school rankings should instead be in buckets.

Like, here is the top bucket, and then here is the also very good, but just underneath the top bucket, the next bucket. Um, but no one, no one listens to me. Uh, but so anyway, to the extent that a ranking. Is intended to be some sort of a measure of a program’s quality. I don’t think that this metric is one that should be included in the weighting.

Look, again, . Life-changing levels of improvements in salary. But when I look at, okay, so these were the top five programs by the salary percentage increase, but now when I look at it by the weighted salary, right, the top five US programs, by weighted salary, it’s not entirely accurate to say that.

Well, these programs, you start with people who have lower incoming salaries and they end up in the same place as the other programs. The numbers do not [00:03:00] really, , the numbers would tell a slightly different story. So if you look at the weighted salary a few years out for the top five programs by salary,

we’re talking about a $70,000 a year difference, roughly 240 a year versus 170 a year. That’s about a 40% difference, which I don’t think is a small, you know, if we were talking 5%, even 10%, I’d be like, yeah, 10%, that’s nothing. It’s, you know, nothing but 40% I do think is a pretty, I think it’s a pretty significant difference, uh, that is worth noting.

And so. Your point about like, well, they were letting in the people who were already on a, you know, if you were making, let’s see if we can, if we figure out, okay, so if we take this, these numbers, then we can sort of back into what’s an implied pre MBA salary, you know, that would indicate maybe something in the mid sixties before MBA versus, you know, one 10 something, [00:04:00] 1, 1 10, 1 15, for these other programs.

I get your argument. Your argument is like, look, these people were already clearly high achievers prior to business school, and so, mm-hmm. Is it not true then that the business school, like they would’ve continued to be high achievers And in fact, this is true, some of the most successful, financially successful people I know skipped business school altogether and they didn’t need it.

, However, I think GMAC often does, polls or surveys of MBA graduates, and I think the vast majority of them, at a minimum say that they’re glad that they went to business school, that they do feel that it was worth, their time. So. How much of this is,, nature versus nurture.

We, we will never know. , But I would gently push back on the fact that I, because these numbers essentially to the extent that they’re lower than say these numbers, it effectively penalizes thes e schools in this ranking. And for that reason, I don’t think that it should be part of the ranking because you’re penalizing a school for letting in more successful people.

But there’s a benefit. [00:05:00] To attending. Like, first of all, if you are a more successful person, think of the opportunity cost that you’re giving up. So the fact that these schools are able to lure away people to give up two years of their salary, in order to go to business school in the first place, I think is a pretty good indicator of the desirability or the perceived desirability of those programs.

Also, I do think that there is merit to thinking about like, who are my peers going to be in a business school? and. If a school is attracting people who were more successful prior to business school, I actually think that that is an indicator of the quality of the school, not only because it shows the people that are willing to give up those two years of salary, but also think about who the peer group is once someone is in the school.

Right? That means that if you are attending one of these schools. This percentage isn’t as high, but you’re surrounded by people who, prior to business school, were already achieving on a different level. And also after they graduate, they continue to achieve on a different level. True. The slope is not as sharp.

Right. But the.

[00:06:00] Result is a larger number. So I think that this implies that perhaps at the school itself, you might be surrounded by people who are driven. some people might say more competitive, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but people who are more driven and also after they graduate, they continue to be driven.

And so I think that also implies something pretty powerful about the ultimate benefit of the network because business school isn’t just the two years you go there and it’s not just that first job you get out of school or that third job you have five years out of school.

it’s also who’s your network gonna be and, and who are you gonna call 10, 15, 20 years after graduation? To invest in your company or to partner with your company or to start a company with. so I do think that there is value to attending a school and to have your peers during school and after school be people who were, for lack of a better term, high performers.

[00:07:00] I don’t think that this should be punished because I do think that this does yield a better business school. Experience and a better result in the long term. And so my quibble, again, I love this metric. I think this is an amazing metric to provide, but my quibble is that this should not be given honestly, any weight at all, and certainly not the high level of weight that it’s given, because again, you’re punishing the schools that, you know, you’re basically indicating that I, what I would say is an indication of quality.

An indirect indication of quality, but an indication of quality all the same. You’re basically punishing the schools that have sort of higher quality, quote unquote, coming in. And, and that to me is. Counterintuitive and kind of wrong. And so that’s why I continue to think that this should not be, uh, reported upon.

Absolutely. Tell us. It’s important. I think it’s great to know. I love using this information, but I don’t think it should be used in terms of like, let’s figure out which programs are the , [00:08:00] quote unquote highest quality programs. But what do you think? What did I miss? let me know. Thanks.

Maria

New around here? I’m an HBS graduate and a proud member (and former Board Member) of AIGAC. I considered opening a high-end boutique admissions consulting firm, but I wanted to make high-quality admissions advice accessible to all, so I “scaled myself” by creating ApplicantLab. ApplicantLab provides the SAME advice as high-end consultants at a much more affordable price. Read our rave reviews on GMATClub, and check out our free trial (no credit card required) today!