The Methodology Behind P&Q’s 2023 Undergraduate B-School Rankings A FULL EXPLANATION OF SOME SLIGHT METHODOLOGICAL CHANGES THIS YEAR BY NATHAN ALLEN
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here’s no way around it. There’s no perfect way of measuring the quality of a business school. Business schools are very complicated. While many share some commonalities, the truth is, many of the schools ranked in our seventh annual Poets&Quants’ Best Undergraduate Business Schools are very different. Still, we believe that the quality of business education generally comes down to three core issues: the quality and backgrounds of the talent coming through the door; what a school does with that talent over four years; and how the marketplace responds to the graduates. In other words: How promising are the incoming students? What is their view of their own academic experience? And what career outcomes are achieved by the graduating class? Admissions and career data comes from a school survey that each school completed between June and December of 2022. The academic experience data comes from an alumni survey, also administered between June and December of last year. This year we surveyed students graduating between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020, or the Class of 2020. And that is exactly the approach we take in what we sincerely believe is the best ranking of undergraduate business programs currently available. This year, we ranked 92 business schools in the U.S., down from 94 schools last year (and slightly down from the most schools we ranked, which was 97 in 2020), but exactly the number of schools we ranked in 2021. SEVERAL DEANS ASKED US TO CREATE THE RANKING In the world of undergraduate business education, there is only one other undergraduate B-school ranking that matters: U.S. News & World Report. The U.S. News list, however, is merely a subset of data from its overall university rankings — a popularity contest based solely on a poll of deans and senior faculty members, most of whom have little to no knowledge of the programs at rival schools. Asking deans to rate other schools is less a measure of a school’s reputation than it is a collection of
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prejudices partly based on the self-fulfilling prophecy of U.S. News’ rankings. As in other years, in creating our 2023 ranking of undergraduate business schools, Poets&Quants invested significant time and effort into putting together an approach that was both fair and thorough. We equally weigh admission standards, the full academic experience, and employment outcomes from data that is specific to each business program — not the overall university to which it is attached. That is an important distinction, because gathering such information as average SAT scores and starting salaries and bonuses, among other things, is not readily available anywhere else. Admission standards, an assessment of the academic experience, and employment outcomes of a business program are critical factors in the quality of the educational experience. Excluding any one of them would result in a disingenuous effort to rank the very best schools. Like last year, we included all schools that submitted school surveys. In previous year’s we’ve not included schools that failed to meet a minimum 10% alumni response rate. Of the 92 schools ranked this year, 80 met the minimum 10% response rate, three less than last year, our second-highest ever. In the past, schools that did not meet the minimum response rate did not have any alumni data included, which significantly lowered their ranking. To help mitigate those fluctuations and reward schools for the alumni data they were able to gather, we included last year’s alumni data for all schools that met the minimum response rate and we included this year’s data on a sliding scale based on response rates. For example, if a school had a 10% or higher response rate, it got the full amount of its alumni data. But if a school had a 9% response rate, it’d only get 90% of its alumni data. Overall, of the participating schools, 54,978 alums had the opportunity to provide responses to the survey about the academic and co-curricular experience of their higher education. Of those, 5,527 responded for an overall response rate of 10.05%. ADMISSIONS STANDARDS (33.3%)
