Wharton rises two spots in 'BusinessWeek'

The Wharton School rose two places to the No. 3 spot in the latest edition of the BusinessWeek graduate business school rankings.

Wharton was ranked behind No. 1 Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and No. 2 University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, but placed ahead of both Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and the Harvard University Business School.

The rankings, released yesterday, are based on three main categories: feedback from students, feedback from recruiters and the school's "intellectual capacity." In order to get the students' perspective on the school, BusinessWeek provides a 46-question survey online. The results of this questionnaire make up 45 percent of the schools' rankings.

"We don't really play to the rankings," Wharton MBA Program Director Peggy Lane said. "We strive to be the best business school in the world, and we hope that the rankings reflect that."

In regard to the information in rankings about the specific schools, "Generally, we don't pay close attention to them because we typically get better information from our own surveys," Lane said.

Wharton's surveys do not differ in content, but the school is able to get the information more quickly.

However, administrators at the University of Chicago GSB have a different perspective.

"When you ask people what led you to a particular school, the answer is usually the rankings," said Stacey Kole, deputy dean of the GSB. "They do matter, whether we like them or not."

The rankings are "in the interests of our program and gets the word out about the programs and faculty at the GSB," Kole said.

Both Penn and the University of Chicago claim that they do not tailor their schools to the rankings. Rather, they say they simply do what is in the best interest of their own school.

"We don't specifically court the rankings," Kole said.

This past spring, Wharton, along with Harvard, decided not to provide BusinessWeek with their students' e-mail information. Despite this decision, Wharton rose in the rankings, and nearly all of the MBA students responded to the survey.

According to Lane, this is because "they still found a way to contact our students, and they got as many as 90 percent of the students they wanted to get."

All in all, many officials see the rankings as a beneficial way to publicize the top schools. "It's free advertising. I don't have to pay to have one of my students on the cover of BusinessWeek," Kole said.

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