BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 2, 2000 ISSUE
COVER STORY Keeping Tabs on B-School Brainpower For the first time, BUSINESS WEEK's rankings measure scholarship and the ability to influence thinking in the business world For more than a decade, BUSINESS WEEK has ranked MBA programs based on a simple standard: customer satisfaction. The schools that got the highest marks from both students and corporate recruiters wound up on top. It's an approach that has worked well over the years, demonstrating which schools offer the strongest programs and produce the most talented and sought-after grads. Now, to make our survey even more comprehensive, we've added a new component that we're calling intellectual capital. Our reasoning is that it's not just the size of the first paycheck or the talent of the graduates that count. It's also the quality of the scholarship and the ability to influence thinking in the business world at large that sets the top B-schools apart. It's difficult to quantify, but we think we've found a way. This year the intellectual capital score will contribute 10% of a school's total ranking. So how did we measure intellectual capital? First, we polled a number of B-school deans and academic program directors to determine the scholarly and professional journals that have the biggest impact. We narrowed the list to 12, including Journal of Finance, American Economic Review, Journal of Marketing Research, Operations Research, and Strategic Management Journal. IDEAS DERBY. Next, we studied each journal going back five years to figure out who the most important thinkers were over the period and where they taught. We gave points based on the length of each article, excluding commentary and editorial pieces. Professors who taught at more than one school during the period had their points assigned to their current schools. We also culled book reviews from the same time period from BUSINESS WEEK, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal to find out whose work was reaching a broad audience. Books on the BUSINESS WEEK bestseller list received bonus points. Finally, to adjust for school size, we totaled the scores for each school and divided by the number of full-time faculty members. The winner of our ideas derby: Duke University, which topped the list thanks to a handful of professors who are leading lights in their specialties. Paul H. Zipkin, for example, published a variety of works on his theories of supply-chain management and inventory policies. Zipkin, who has been teaching for 23 years, has been a professor at Duke for the last five years. Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Dimitris Bertsimas and Lester C. Thurow topped that school's list, giving it the No. 2 spot. Thurow's best-selling book The Future of Capitalism: How Today's Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow's World highlighted his theory that the global economy is to blame for the widening gap between the haves and have-nots in America. Adding this new factor to our rankings yielded some intriguing results. Some schools, including Stanford University, Duke, and MIT moved a notch or two higher in the overall rankings because of their intellectual-capital scores, while others, including University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and New York University were ratcheted down slightly. After Duke and MIT, the schools that nabbed the highest intellectual-capital scores were Stanford, and Cornell University. On sheer volume, before adjusting for faculty size, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia Business School, Harvard Business School, MIT, and University of Chicago's B-school came out on top, with Wharton taking a commanding lead. The marketplace for ideas is clearly thriving at the nation's B-schools. That's why we wanted to reflect in our survey that there's more to an MBA than placing students in high-paying jobs. The elite schools also expose students to the best in management thinking and to ideas that will likely influence business long after students pick up their degrees. By Jennifer Merritt in New York _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS The Best B-Schools Table of Contents The Best B-Schools COVER IMAGE: The Best B-Schools TABLE: How the Report Cards Get Graded It's a Whole New B-Game A Global Report Card Building a World-Class Business School in Japan (int'l edition) INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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