Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/59976
From Editors the We're No. 1! I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University during the last half of the 1970s, a period when the Wildcats fielded one of the worst football teams in history. If memory serves, over the course of a couple of years, we lost 33 straight games, usually by horrifyingly large mar- gins. I saw a cartoon one day featuring a scoreboard that said, "Interstate 294, Northwestern 0." Undaunted, students and fans poured into the stadium to cheer on the team. We couldn't offer the usual taunts, promising to demolish our opponents with superior play, so this was our favorite chant: "We have higher SATs! We have higher SATs!" Even that probably wasn't true, but at the time it was desperately important to believe. All of us want to believe that we are different from—better than—our competitors and our colleagues, even if only by the slimmest margin. We want something to cheer about. We want to be unique. Trouble is, a tendency to benchmark against each other and a commit- ment to continuous improvement have leveled the playing field among modern business schools. That's particularly true for accredited schools with national or international reputations, which all offer an excellent education and marvelous opportunities. It has become more difficult for these schools, in particular, to stand out from their peers. In recent years, business schools have tried to make themselves unique— and give themselves something to cheer about—by winning a high place in the media rankings. If they manage to move up by a point or two, they pub- licize their accomplishments with a blizzard of news releases. But it's unclear what they've bought with their time and money. In "What Price Rankings?" Andy Policano deconstructs the rankings race and the impact it has had on management education. While he acknowledges that rankings have had some positive effects— such as giving schools an outsider's perspective on their strengths and weak- nesses—he feels they have caused schools to divert too much attention to MBA programs at the expense of BBA programs. Worse, he argues, schools are focusing their resources on moving up in the rankings instead of improving their programs. Even so, he points out, the schools that consistently rank in the top tier are still in the top tier; those in the second and third tier shuffle their places but rarely gain or lose ground in any meaningfulway. Can the rankings system be fixed? Policano thinks so, and he predicts the changes that might—and should—occur within the decade to make the rankings race less fren- zied. If administrators can spend less time chasing a number and more time on quality improvement, everybody will win. That really would be something to cheer about.s z 6 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005 BILL BASCOM