By Ravi Kumar
KAIST Business School Dean
Just last week, I was watching a CNN show where Malcolm Gladwell was talking about the absurdity of college rankings. His arguments against the rankings, mainly focused on U.S. News and World Report rankings, were that the measures of quality were not appropriate. Some of the measurements were tautological and with the appropriate weights on the dimensions measured (and even changing these dimensions), the rankings can change dramatically, and that is exactly what each of the magazines and newspapers that rank do. They measure the dimensions differently, change the weighting of dimensions or vary the dimensions slightly to differentiate their own ranking and voila, a new ranking of universities and schools appears.
There are literally hundreds of rankings of schools and universities -- essentially a market for rankings has emerged. Every country has its own spate of newspapers and magazines ranking universities within each country and across countries. For example, Hankyung ranked Korea Business School as No. 1 in Korea in 2010, while Joong-Ang ranked SKK’s International MBA program as No. 1, Eduniversal ranks Seoul National University Business School as No. 1, Top Ranking MBA has Yonsei Business School as the only Korean school in its top 25 and in 2011, Financial Times has KAIST Business School’s full-time MBA (and its Executive Education Open Enrollment programs) as the only Korean school in the top 100 global MBA programs (and global top 30) respectively.
And so, every school has their favorite ranking where they are ranked high in general or in specific terms. One Korean university even may say that it is ranked in the top ten in internationalization given the size of its foreign exchange program. So, what does all this mean? Who cares about these rankings? Do we need them? How should we interpret them?
The first question is: to whom are these rankings targeted as comparative information? Is it for domestic students who are potential applicants? Is it for foreign student applicants? Is it for parents? Is it for recruiters who are searching for human resource talent? Is it for the universities? Each has their own perspective.
More than 20 years ago, university and school administrations did not have to worry about rankings because they did not exist. Students nevertheless did apply, based on brand and reputations built by universities, and information provided by the schools themselves.
But there was a sense that students and their parents did not receive objective information about any specific school; more importantly, there was lack of comparative information to help them make their decision as to where to apply and also, which school to choose, given multiple admission offers.
So news organizations got into the business of rankings, to serve the public cause and also to sell more of their newspapers and magazines.
So, how are domestic students benefitting from these rankings? Given multiple rankings and with the example shown of all known top schools (like the SKY schools, namely SNU, Korea and Yonsei in Korea) all No. 1 in some ranking or other, this information more often than not, confuses the applicants.
Similarly, foreign students can also be confused with so many rankings available and more importantly, as Mr. Gladwell points out, will an MBA student applicant, who is interested in a specific area, like internationalization or consulting or financial engineering, even consider top ranked schools that are not known for this specialty?
Are parents better informed by these rankings? In fact, research by Alan Kreuger, a renowned economist in the U.S., points out that going to less selective (and hence, lower ranked) schools earn as much as those who graduate from America’s Ivy League schools.
So, parents need to be concerned more over what their children are capable of and want to do in the future, than on the prestige of the rankings. This applies equally to corporate recruiters who need to look at who has been successful in their own firms and not blindly count on highly ranked schools to provide them with human resource talent.
Should we scrap the rankings? Some will say that rankings make universities and schools care more—but care about what? About those dimensions that they were ranked on. And with so many dimensions in so many rankings, universities and schools have also come to the conclusion that they cannot cater to all the rankings and hence, they should focus on what specializations they do best in and get accredited by international organizations, like AACSB and EQUIS for business schools, that signal that these schools are well-managed to provide good teaching and research to educate their students.
Will rankings go away? I think not and I hope not, because rankings do provide information that if selectively used, can be very helpful to all concerned.
For example, MBA student applicants interested in an international career can look across all the rankings on how each measures the internationalization dimension to select those school that provide the appropriate courses, the needed experiential learning exercises, the international peer group or alumni support and opportunity to work for and be recruited by international companies.
Students interested in becoming consultants should study all the rankings that have dimensions relating to consulting skill development through courses, consulting project driven courses and actual consulting jobs earned by alumni and offered by consulting companies at various schools.
And universities and schools can use these rankings to show them where they are strong and where they are weak—clearly, if they are weak in dimensions that are important to them, this should give them the impetus to improve.
So, ranking are not as good, or as bad, as they are made out to be. The smart student applicant, parent, recruiter and university or school can take advantage of the enormous amounts of information collected and use it judiciously to their advantage.