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CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS: A TALE OF TWO SURVEYSLet the customer speak. That's the philosophy behind BUSINESS WEEK's ranking of the best business schools. We think B-schools have two customers: the graduates, who trade their suits for backpacks; and recruiters, who seek out the best and brightest from among the business schools' ranks. The frank views we receive from both groups have made BUSINESS WEEK's ranking a crucial source of information on business schools since it was first undertaken a decade ago. We asked for feedback from graduates of the Class of 1998 at 61 top schools--10 more than in 1996. On the recruiter side, 259 companies who hired a total of 10,348 new MBAs this year gave us their input. We enlisted two esteemed statistics consultants, David M. Rindskopf and Alan L. Gross, professors of educational psychology at the City University of New York Graduate School & University Center, to analyze the data and ensure that it met our quality standards. GRADUATE SURVEY: We sent a 39-question survey to 9,598 randomly selected members of the Class of 1998. We got back 6,020 replies, for a response rate of 63%. For the first time, we let grads complete the survey either online or on paper, and two-thirds of the respondents took the digital option. Grads were asked to answer most questions on a scale of 1 to 10. One example: ''How would you judge the responsiveness of the faculty and administration to students' concerns and opinions?'' In this case, an answer of 1 meant poor, while 10 stood for outstanding. The 1998 surveys count for 50% of a school's student-satisfaction score. The other 50% comes from the responses of 4,891 graduates in the 1996 poll and 4,626 from 1994. Each carries a weight of 25%. This is done to ensure that short-lived changes don't have too much impact. We also removed any surveys that our consultants found to be statistically aberrant (page 94). RECRUITER SURVEY: A total of 350 companies that are active recruiters of MBAs were polled, and 259, or 74%, responded. Recruiters were asked to rank their top 20 schools in order, based on the quality of the students and their company's experience with the graduates. The top school got 20 points, and No.20 got one point. Each school's total score was then divided by the number of responding companies that recruited MBAs from that school. Because larger schools tend to attract more recruiters, we gave some of the smaller schools an upward adjustment to counter any possible bias. COMPOSITE RANKING: To come up with its overall ranking, BUSINESS WEEK combines the raw scores of both surveys rather than totaling a school's rank in both polls and dividing it by two. This approach accounts for the statistical significance of one school's lead over another in each poll and gives more credit to schools with a commanding advantage in one area. Because there are greater differences among the schools in the corporate survey, recruiter opinion tends to have a slightly greater weight in the overall ranking.
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Updated Oct. 8, 1998 by bwwebmaster
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