A little bit of objectivity, please

You know something big has happened when the dean sends out a mass email 10pm at night. On Tuesday night he alerted us to the latest rankings from the WSJ, published in the newspaper’s Wednesday edition. It ranked Kenan-Flagler at number 8 among all MBA programs in the country, up from number 9 last year.

 

Last week I was at the House Undergraduate Library when I came across a copy of the Wall Street Journal Guide to the Top Business Schools (not sure what edition it was). This book bears no mention of the WSJ rankings and looking through it, it’s hard to believe both the book and the WSJ rankings were published by the same company. The book’s write up of Kenan-Flagler was favorable, but not any more favorable than what it has written about other schools. Each school has a write up with a paragraph toward the end describing what recruiters like and dislike about the program. For many of the schools that I looked up, including Kenan-Flagler, the list of positives include soft skills like ability to work in teams, ethical behavior, likeability. The problem with this is that these are not the skills one would take two years off from work to learn in an MBA program. Most of these soft skills (a good example is ethical behavior) are things that either you have or don’t have, and spending two years in any MBA program will do very little to change it. The write up on Fuqua, on the other hand, was excellent. It listed the ability to think strategically and good analytical skills as traits recruiters see in Fuqua students. And these are skills one would most like to get from earning an MBA.

 

The WSJ rankings is a good example of how rankings are important only for the people who wish to assign importance onto them. Because this set of rankings places our school most favorably, it is the one most mentioned by Kenan-Flagler students. I personally am suspicious of it because of its continued practice of placing Harvard and Stanford in the mid teens. I have heard classmates say that the WSJ rankings are the more reliable set of rankings because it surveys attitudes among recruiters. To which my response is, if recruiters think more highly of Kenan-Flagler students than those from Harvard and Stanford, then why is the average starting salary at Harvard and Stanford so much higher than that at Kenan-Flagler. (insert mischievous laugh)