As Wharton Dean Patrick Harker announced last week, the business school's graduate division will not be included in the rankings conducted by periodicals such as U.S. News and World Report and BusinessWeek.
Harker said last Tuesday that the Wharton School will no longer distribute lists of the e-mail addresses of alumni and students to commercial organizations, which use the information to conduct surveys for the rankings.
The same day, Harvard Business School announced that it had made the same decision.
Harker cited several reasons to support the move, including the protection of alumni and student privacy, methodology differences among surveyors and the alleged ineffectiveness of current rankings.
"This is about not providing e-mail lists for current students and alumni, and not about general data about the school," Wharton Communications Director Michael Baltes said. "We felt it was an appropriate time to formalize our policy with regard to providing e-mail lists."
Baltes also noted the varying methodologies of different ranking publications, which Harker believes can be misleading to readers.
"There are multiple rankings by multiple organizations, all with different methodologies," Baltes said. "Given these factors, each ranking needs to continually differentiate itself with the ultimate purpose of selling magazines, Web sites, guidebooks, etc., as they are commercial enterprises."
Wharton professor and Marketing Department Chairman Stephen Hoch questioned the effectiveness of current rankings.
The rankings "can't do much to distinguish [between] these schools," Hoch said. "People look at the difference between one and two, between three and four," when "there are no differences there."
Despite the controversy surrounding the move, Hoch was confident in Wharton's decision.
"The fact that [Wharton and HBS] both benefited from the rankings puts us in a more credible position," Hoch said. The decision "is a signal that [Wharton is] not going to be held hostage by a particular methodology."
To provide students with alternate sources of comparative data, Harker announced Wharton's support of the Graduate Management Admission Council, which is currently working to develop an objective informational database.
According to Baltes, GMAC "already has an operational database that includes data from numerous schools from around the world," with Wharton and Harvard as "simply two schools that are interested in [this] modified system."
While it is unclear how other business schools nationwide will react to Wharton's announcement, Hoch said that he does not anticipate a stir in the academic community.
"I don't think there's going to be a big backlash one way or another," Hoch said. "And I doubt if everybody is just going to jump on the bandwagon, because the other schools may have a potential to benefit" from Wharton's and Harvard's exit from the rankings.
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