The value of university rankings for customers

Business schools rankings, if conducted according to the basic principles of impartiality, transparency and consistency, add real value to the market. In the past years, many new ranking schemes have entered the scene, evidence that the market demands them. Different stakeholders –prospective students, recruiters and corporate clients- see rankings as additional criteria to gather further information and make the educational offerings more easily comparable. It is thus legitimate that an initiative that provides value to the market has its returns and becomes profitable for those who undertake such effort. I have no objections here. I appreciate the positive attitude of those ranking producers who contribute to the transparency of the activity by engaging in a constructive debate with representatives of the institutions examined.

 The rankings phenomenon is not unique to education. Law firms, consulting companies and even auditors live under the rule of the rankers.

 Certainly, rankings are here to stay and will probably proliferate in the future. Once European higher education systems in Europe adopt the same structure and cross border movement of students increases, applicants to a diverse set of disciplines will need to compare many different elements and will use rankings as an instrument to decide where to study. The recent flourish of worldwide university rankings anticipates and evidences this.

 One of the frequent criticisms against rankings is that they compare institutions that are intrinsically different. As one dean used to say “it’s like comparing apples with oranges.” How can you compare, for example, a Chinese executive education centre run by practitioners with an American research university-based business school mainly composed of academics? These two hypothetical institutions may both offer MBA programs, but their location, mission, faculty profile and research output vary essentially and are thus not comparable. The basis of this criticism is the incommensurability argument: different values or things of a different genre cannot be weighted according to the same scale; you cannot compare apples with oranges.

 The incommensurability argument is appealing from a theoretical perspective and has generated long debates in different disciplines such as jurisprudence or aesthetics. However, it is irrelevant in practice. Every day we have to evaluate different things and take decisions. Should I go to the theatre tonight or dine with my friends at home? If I invite my friends for dinner, should I prepare sushi or paella? The irrelevance of the incommensurability argument for the practice has been evidenced by some authors of aesthetics theory like Oscar Tusquets, who stated that "everything is comparable".[1] The epitome of this comparability thesis is probably the maxim stated by Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto of 1908: "A screaming automobile that seems to run on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace."

 Indeed, different offerings and diverse institutions are comparable from the perspective of the applicant who wants to decide where to study an MBA. One of the virtues of rankings is that they provide information to reduce the scope of the analysis for applicants. For example, they may help identify which are the institutions best regarded in Europe, America or Asia, or which business schools excel in a certain management discipline or which MBA programs are better considered by some selected recruiters. Here, the Financial Times MBA Rankings is probably the most respected ranking including schools from all continents in a single table.

 But the crux of comparability is the data considered as the basis for comparison, the question about different sets of standards’ data usable for rankings. Certainly, concepts like "full professor", "foreign students", "starting salary" or "aims achieved at the end of the program", just to name a few, may have different meanings and be measured differently across the board. Who can legitimately give a standard meaning to those and other open concepts?

Rankings are here to stay. They add value to potential students and they certainly represent a major reputation driver for educational institutions.

Notes

This post has been adapted from my book: "The Learning Curve: How Business Schools Are Reinventing Education" (London: Palsgrave Macmillan, 2011)

[1] O. Tusquets Blanca, Todo Es Comparable, (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2003).