Della Bradshaw, The Financial Times Business Education editor.
I think I have to take issue with Prof Policano's comment that there is a "trade off between making more money and reporting more accurately".
At the FT - and I'm absolutely certain this is true at other publications which rank business schools - reporting accuracy is NEVER compromised in order to make money, be that selling advertising or newspapers. Indeed, anyone can view all our rankings on ft.com completely free of charge - it is a non-subscription service.
At the FT we have spent years trying to make our rankings more stable, not less stable. We compile salary data and alumni opinion over three years, for example. And when a ranking has been running for more than three years, we introduce a three year average score, which we tell our readers is a better indicator for schools, especially ESTABLISHED schools, notably those in the US.
We also "band" schools, into four bands for our MBA rankings - equivalent to the ratings Prof Policano is looking for - and point out in the footnotes that schools are ranked in these clusters.
Because the FT is a global ranking - not a US one - we include very fast-growing schools, in both Europe and Asia. Just to give you one specific example, the FT ranks the University of Oxford's MBA at number 25 in the world. Ten years ago this programme did not exist.
Prof Policano's argument that that top 50 US schools are much the same schools, year in, year out, has some validity. But the top 50 or 100 global schools are certainly not!
Prof Policano notes that at his previous school, the MBA programme did not change much from year to year. But there are schools where the programmes do change, and the schools involved want that recorded through the rankings. A rating system may not achieve this.
For every dean that wants more stability in the rankings there is one that doesn't..... one complaint I often hear is that our three-year weighting system penalises innovative schools. This is particularly true in our executive education rankings where these shorter programmes are revamped on a near-annual basis - or even replaced completely.
On a final note, one often-voiced complaint is that rankings should be more transparent. Wouldn't a move from rankings to ratings make them less transparent?
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