Résumé en français : Une manière de choisir son MBA est de se référer aux grands classements des grands magazines. Mais les critères sélectionnés par la presse sont-ils ceux qui reflètent le mieux les attentes des étudiants?

It is no secret that the world’s biggest business schools want to attract the top students. And as the competition is hotter than ever, MBA programs are doing all they can to attract attention. One way to do this is to rank in the MBA top 100 list. MBA and EMBA rankings are a lucrative industry for the media outlets which produce them, including Business Week, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.

Each publication uses its own methodology and survey tools when working out the rankings. The Financial Times surveys 150 MBA schools. The survey of alumni is carried out three years after graduation. It looks at salary growth and career progress. The Economist bases its rankings on data from a survey of 135 pre-selected schools and their students, measuring personal development, potential to network and career opportunities. But what happens when the markers do not agree?

Queen’s School of Business places first among non-US schools in the Business Week MBA rankings. However, the school is currently not involved with The Financial Times rankings. "The Financial Times survey is focused on salary," says Dean David Saunders from Queen’s School of Business. "We completely redesigned our program three years ago and our program is not structured to concentrate on salary. I have never met a student in 26 years who said the primary reason they were attending an MBA program is to increase their salary." Dr. Saunders explains that the school chose to participate in Business Week because the survey is based on satisfaction. ‘It asks if you got what you wanted, are you happy with it,’ he says.

Most school officials believe that accreditation is the best marker of MBA quality, even if rankings do play an important role in attracting new students. But now some students are becoming wary of the rankings, and they are starting to concentrate on speaking to alumni, reading reports about the schools and reading blogs about the faculty in order to gain a real insight into the school. MBA student Ms. Chandrasekaran from India studies at Queen’s School of Business. She says that she views rankings as ‘a lot of PR and marketing because there’s a huge market for MBA students.’ But she does like the fact that her school comes out on top. “Students do know that we're on top in Business Week and we're happy about it. We would definitely want to maintain our ranking,” she says.

For Professor Jerold Zimmerman of the University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business, MBA rankings pose a danger to business schools. Business schools, he believes, “are locked in a dysfunctional competition for rankings that diverts resources – faculty and administrative time, money and energy – from research and from undergraduate and PhD programs into short-term strategies aimed at improving their competitive position.” Professor Zimmerman believes that MBA rankings drain resources and are full of bias – he refers to them as “statistical noise”.

Business professor Cherul McWatters at the University of Alberta agrees with Mr. Zimmerman. “I see rankings used as more of a recruitment strategy,” she says, “but are they valid? I’ve always been suspicious about how schools can be so high on one survey and so low on another. Who is giving them the data and does it really tell you if a school is good?”