Wharton policy does little to rankings

Over 90 percent of Wharton MBA students were surveyed by BusinessWeek for the 2004 MBA rankings, despite Wharton Dean Patrick Harker's April announcement ending the distribution of student e-mail lists to publications that rank schools.

Harker attempted to diminish the power of school rankings like those included in publications such as BusinessWeek and U.S. News and World Report, but Wharton will still be included in the rankings.

The dean denounced the rankings last spring in an e-mail sent to Wharton MBA students, asserting that the academic community places an overemphasis on the rankings. Harvard Business School made the same decision, prompting speculation that many other business schools may also follow suit.

However, no other schools have followed Wharton and Harvard's lead as of yet. BusinessWeek also managed to survey over 90 percent of business students at Harvard, allowing the magazine to include both schools in the 2004 rankings.

"Through a variety of publicly available information, we were able to reach more than 90 percent of the Class of 2004," BusinessWeek B-schools Department Editor Jennifer Merritt said of Wharton in an e-mail. The "pool of students who received our survey was nearly the same size as it always had been."

Because the publication was able to contact almost the same numbers of students at Wharton and Harvard this year as before, the ranking process was not affected all that much, according to Merritt.

"It is not something we've aggressively monitored, but there are administrators, faculty and students at other schools who have publicly supported the decision," Wharton Director of Communications Michael Baltes said in an e-mail.

Baltes said there was little concern voiced by students in the spring over the decision, and the issue has not been addressed again this fall. Harker never asked students not to respond to the BusinessWeek surveys.

"At no time has the school discouraged students from answering any media survey. They are always free to participate if they wish to," Baltes said.

BusinessWeek will release the 2004 rankings of MBA programs worldwide on Oct. 7. The rankings are based on the results of an extensive student survey, a recruiter survey and an intellectual-capital report, according to Merritt.

The rankings use "input from the two main consumers of the graduate schools -- students who pay for the education and recruiters who hire those students when they graduate," Merritt said.

BusinessWeek began ranking schools in 1988. At the time, they were the only MBA rankings available.

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