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November 13, 2014

The BusinessWeek Best B School Rankings Are Out!

Posted by David Zaring

And Wharton finishes second, the deal is that it is always supposed to be in the top 3, so that's nice. The rankings are weird - they change methodology each time, which means that they got to put Duke first this year, which is incorrect. Most of the rankings, moreover, are based on student surveys (hmmm), and employer surveys, again, with widely varying samples over time. Social science, this is not.

However, perhaps the oddest single table in the rankings comes from what you'd think would be its most objective metric. BW counted the number of articles written by tenure track faculty in 20 journals, adopted a weird point system for apportioning credit based on length and co-authors (but not totally weird), and must have expressed the final number per capita (it's impossible to imagine that Wharton wouldn't finish first on the list otherwise - the school has 240 TT faculty, way more than anyone else).

Here's the top six, Ohio State is also in the top ten:

1. UC San Diego

2. Duke

3. Cornell

4. Wash. U.

5. Texas at Dallas

6. Maryland

I'm not really sure what to make of such a diverse array of schools, which don't include Chicago, Stanford, &c, &c. It's only through the survey responses that BW ends up with a ranking that looks somewhat "normal."

PS, if you're wondering what's a good business school journal, BW's list isn't bad. It includes:

the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Operations Research, Information Systems Research, Journal of Finance, American Economic Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Marketing Research, Strategic Management Journal, Accounting Review, Academy of Management Journal, Production & Operations Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Consumer Research, Review of Financial Studies, Administrative Science Quarterly, Marketing Science.