Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has unveiled its User’s Guide to Full-Time MBA Rankings, a comprehensive online tool designed to help prospective graduate business students better understand the ranking methodologies established by five well-known publications.
Housed on mba.com – the council’s student facing website viewed by more than eight million unique visitors yearly – this guide clearly summarises and compares the content included in each of the five ranking methodologies.
“Our research shows that individuals applying to graduate management education programs consider rankings an influential part of their decision-making process,” said Sangeet Chowfla, president and CEO of GMAC.
“Though rankings exist to provide useful information to judge the quality of MBA programs, the existence of multiple rankings contributes to confusion among applicants. We created this resource to clarify the differences among the various rankings, as no one ranking methodology can speak to the individual needs and aspirations of every candidate considering a business degree.”
Rankings are appealing to applicants because they provide some level of clarity and order to a marketplace of business schools that is highly complex. They curate diverse data points from a variety of sources into a simple, easily comparable measure of overall quality.
The inherent issue with rankings, however, is that quality is highly subjective and there is no universally agreed upon way to measure it. For that reason, multiple rankings exist for full-time MBA programs, each with its own methodology that draws upon a different mix of data indicators and weights.
The interactive guide highlights each of the five major rankings (Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, The Financial Times, Forbes and U.S. News & World Report) by breaking down their methodologies across standardised weighting categories, identifying distinctive aspects of each ranking, and presenting a compilation of other useful ranking information and analysis.
