MBA Crystal Ball

Question on the MBA Crystal Ball blog:

Why doesn't a strong school like Stern rank high on all rankings? Which is the best MBA ranking for international students?

My response:

At the outset I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of rankings. They can never capture what’s truly relevant for each and every applicant from every part of the world.

The reason Stern doesn’t rank well in every ranking has a direct correlation to the methodology followed by each publication.

• Some like FT & Forbes give a lot of importance to salaries (and NY salaries clearly have an edge over the other cities).
• US News is relatively more qualitative, but it also relies on the opinions of deans and employers.
• The Economist methodology generates more shock value than real insights.
• Businessweek has been constantly tweaking its methodology, so there are consistency issues over the years.

The bottomline is, for an international student, it’s best to take the MBA rankings with a fistful of salt and create an independent methodology using parameters that are more important from a personal perspective.

For instance, if your aspiration is to work on Wall Street, your odds of breaking in improve dramatically if you attend Stern, Columbia or even Cornell – as opposed to INSEAD which might be ranked number one in the world by FT.