 
|
|||||||||
              
|
CMU's business school rated No. 2 in world
Tuesday, May 01, 2001 By Bill Schackner, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Using a new method that relied exclusively on opinions of corporate recruiters, a survey released yesterday placed Carnegie Mellon University's business school at No. 2, behind Dartmouth College, in a ranking of the top 50 business schools in the world.
The survey published in The Wall Street Journal was intended to identify which master's of business administration programs in the U.S. and abroad are producing the most marketable students. Its findings already are raising eyebrows, because some of the nation's biggest names in business training, like Harvard, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford -- were not among the top five.
But at Carnegie Mellon, the ranking was embraced as evidence of the school's ascent.
"I'm both pleased and proud," said Douglas M. Dunn, dean of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, who by midafternoon had already been inundated by congratulatory e-mails from alumni.
He called it gratifying that a school with a full-time enrollment of only 437 students could compete successfully with schools from the Ivy League that are four times its size.
Rounding out the top five were the business schools at Yale University, the University of Michigan and Northwestern University.
"In rating Carnegie Mellon, recruiters gave it high marks because of past success with the quality of its graduates," The Journal wrote. Recruiters "said the Pittsburgh school's students shine because of their analytical and problem-solving skills, their ability to drive results and their teamwork strengths."
Recruiters used descriptions of the school such as an "incubator of quantitative experts" and "boot camp -- good work ethic."
Still, the picture was not entirely upbeat. It said recruiters gave the students lower marks for their communication and interpersonal skills and for their international perspective.
In joining an increasingly crowded field of campus rankings, editors at The Journal said they wanted to do something that would distinguish their effort from other business school surveys. So instead of analyzing a flurry of school statistics, or polling deans and students, the publication turned to people it said know the schools' graduates best.
As part of a joint undertaking with Harris Interactive Inc., a research firm, 1,600 corporate recruiters were asked to evaluate up to three schools with which they'd had firsthand dealings. Those recruiters based their ratings on 27 attributes, such as how well past graduates have fared in their corporations, the graduates' ability to achieve results and the kind of teaching that occurs on those campuses.
The growing influence that college rankings have on everything from student application rates to fund raising has made such findings increasingly controversial. It has led to complaints by some campuses that ratings are at best subjective and at worst incorrect.
But Ronald Alsop, the Wall Street Journal news editor who initiated the project, said talking to recruiters made sense.
"People mostly go to business schools to get a better job or to change careers, so we think it really matters to prospective students to know which schools the corporate recruiters consider tops from their companies' perspectives," he said.
Alsop said the poll was essentially a consumer survey, since recruiters and their corporations are "the buyers of MBA talent."
Some other surveys use raw statistics that favor a school's size, such as how many graduates are in the work force. Other surveys that seek input from corporations sometimes distribute surveys among human resources departments with no guarantee that the person who responds knows much about the school being ranked.
Those surveys tend to produce results skewed against smaller schools, even if they offer strong instruction, said Paul Danos, dean of the business school at Dartmouth.
Dunn said The Journal approach "got it right."
Such enthusiasm was understandably lacking at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, which finishes within the top five schools in most rankings, but found itself yesterday in 18th place.
Small schools like Carnegie Mellon fared well. Half of the first 10 schools and 14 of the top 25 had MBA enrollments of under 500 students, the Journal said.
Other elite schools that did more poorly than in other surveys were Harvard University, which finished eighth, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 38th and Stanford University at 45th.
Editors at The Journal said recruiters found that at some elite schools, students expected higher salaries and tended not to stay as long with companies that hired them. Schools in California were cited by recruiters for a weather-related problem: Their students were less willing, given their state's pleasant climate, to relocate.
|
||||||||
