Admissions leaders have mixed feelings about U.S. News.
The decision by some top law schools to exit the U.S. News & World Report rankings hasn’t led to anything similar among business schools (yet), but if it did, many admissions officers would welcome it, according to Manhattan Prep/Kaplan’s 2022 business school admissions officers survey.
Among the admissions officers surveyed at 117 full-time M.B.A. programs across the United States, 37 percent believe that “business school rankings have lost some of their prestige over the last couple of years,” and 29 percent disagree with that point of view; the remaining 34 percent didn’t express one view or the other. Additionally, 34 percent of business school admissions officers “think it would be a positive development, for both business schools and applicants, for business school rankings to no longer exist,” while 30 percent disagree; the remaining 36 percent didn’t express one view or the other.
These evolving views on the rankings come at a time of significant change in the M.B.A. admissions landscape, with business schools looking for ways to boost their application numbers and many continuing to remain test optional, a COVID-19-era policy, as a way to accomplish this. It also comes at a time when some business schools and colleges have come under fire for reporting false data to game the rankings.
Those who held negative views about the rankings shared these reasons:
Scott Jaschik, Editor, is one of the three founders of Inside Higher Ed. With Doug Lederman, he leads the editorial operations of Inside Higher Ed, overseeing news content, opinion pieces, career advice, blogs and other features. Scott is a leading voice on higher education issues, quoted regularly in publications nationwide, and publishing articles on colleges in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Salon, and elsewhere. He has been a judge or screener for the National Magazine Awards, the Online Journalism Awards, the Folio Editorial Excellence Awards, and the Education Writers Association Awards. Scott served as a mentor in the community college fellowship program of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, of Teachers College, Columbia University. He is a member of the board of the Education Writers Association. From 1999-2003, Scott was editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Scott grew up in Rochester, N.Y., and graduated from Cornell University in 1985. He lives in Washington.
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