According to an article just published on BW Online, Harvard and Wharton business schools will no longer be furnishing Business Week with access to their current students for the MBA rankings survey. In the past, the two schools have provided the magazine with the email addresses of current students in order to facilitate polling for the ‘student satisfaction’ component of their MBA rankings survey. The student satisfaction rating has been a key aspect of the BW rankings over the years, since it is the differentiating feature of the magazine’s survey.
In the article/letter to readers, Jennifer Merritt (Business Week’s B-Schools Editor), mentions that HBS and Wharton cited ‘privacy concerns’ along with ‘other reasons’ when explaining the change in policy. The BW article stresses that over 100 schools continue to cooperate and that the survey will go forward (it is typically released in October). BW also calls for current HBS and Wharton students to contact them independently in order to participate in the student component of the survey. Wharton’s official statment on this matter is also worth reading.
In light of this news, a few questions come to mind:
1) Will other top schools follow suit based on HBS and Wharton’s decision? Do some schools have more to gain from the rankings than others?
2) The Business Week article cites the fact that Wharton and Harvard both experienced substantial drops in student satisfaction between the 2000 and the 2002 surveys. Could this have something to do with the school’s decisions or are the programs simply growing tired of ‘rankings saturation’ (Forbes, Economist, FT, WSJ, US News, BW, etc.)?
3) Will students at HBS and Wharton contact BW on their own? If so, will this be viewed as going against their administrations’ wishes? Will enough students contact BW in order to provide a statistically significant set of data?
There are many other questions that come to mind, so feel free to email us with your thoughts on this topic…
