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What Price Many business schools are upping the ante to compete in the rankings game. Ultimately, the costs to the learning environment may simply be too high. F ew people can remember what it was like before 1987—what I call the year before the storm. It was a time when business school deans could actually focus on improving the quality of their schools' education- al offerings. Discussions about strategic marketing were confined mostly to the marketing curriculum. PR firms were hired by businesses, not business schools. Many busi- ness schools had sufficient facilities, but few buildings had marble floors, soaring atriums, or plush carpeting. Public university tuition was affordable for most students, and even topMBA programs were accessible to students with high potential but low GMAT scores. All this began to change in 1988 when Positive Intentions Many make the case that the rankings have had some positive influence on the business schoolmarket. After all, they do pro- vide an external viewpoint that shows business school admin- istrators and staff what students and recruiters think of their schools. Students and recruiters will often say to the media what they won't say directly to deans or faculty. As a result, the rankings provide the type of insight that business schools are unable to provide for themselves. In an age of abundant, yet often scattered, by Andrew J. Policano illustration by Robert Neubecker BusinessWeek published its first article that ranked full-time MBA programs. That article set in motion a rankings frenzy that has escalated every year. Today, few busi- ness school deans can ignore the impact that MBA rankings have had on their schools. The percentage of resources busi- ness schools now devote to engineering the ranking of their full-time MBA programs is up; the percentage of resources they devote to their undergraduate programs, curricular inno- vation, and research is down. And with students, alumni, and donors veritably rankings-obsessed, deans ignore the rankings at their own peril. To manage the rankings and their impact, deans must understand three important factors: how the rankings work, what theymeasure, and what business schools can do to exert their own influence. To understand the first two factors, busi- ness school deans can speak to editors of the rankings, who freely share their methods. Here, however, I focus on the last issue: what each business school can do individually and what business schools can do as a group to change the way the rankings work. Only in this way can we calm the storm that the rankings have created. 26 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005 information, the various rankings also give prospective students a place to start their research. They provide accessible information to students seeking MBA programs that best suit their talents, intentions, and budgets. But what value do rankings add to information already available, and just how useful is this information? It may not be very useful at all. An examination of the data from the rankings of full-time MBA programs between 2002 and 2004—published in BusinessWeek, Financial Times, and U.S. News&World Report—reveals three telling similarities: s All three rankings agree on 17 of the top 20 schools, the same 17 schools that most in the market would identify as top-tier. Flash back to before the rankings, to 1987, when a little-known publication called MBA placed the same 17 schools in its own top 20. This consistency suggests that these 17 schools have such strong reputations that their status in the marketplace is unlikely to change whether or not they are numbered in a published ranking. s Between 2002 and 2004, eight schools vied for the other three spots in the top 20 in the rankings from all three publications. s The quantitative differences among the 25 to 30 schools in the second tier are relatively slight. In fact, BusinessWeek lists the schools ranked 31 to 50 alphabetically, rather than