Wharton's No. 1 again.
But the publication that named it as such isn't too happy with Penn's business school.
Last week, national magazine Business Week ranked Wharton as the top business school for undergraduates.
Getting enough information to rank Wharton, however, was a bit of a struggle for the magazine.
Two years ago, Wharton administrators decided to stop providing students' e-mail addresses to publications that do university rankings, including Business Week.
The magazine uses the addresses to send survey questions for its ranking process.
Business Week has criticized Wharton's decision; universities that "won't cooperate" make providing rankings information "much harder," said Louis Lavelle, the magazine's business-schools editor.
"We think Wharton is a great school, and we'd really like to include it in our rankings, so we're not happy that they decided to not cooperate with us," Lavelle said.
Still, Wharton's undergraduate division managed to come out on top, as Business Week has tried to work around the school's policy.
The magazine now finds student contact information through public sources, according to Lavelle. Students then respond to survey questions voluntarily.
Wharton officials, however, stand by their decision not to provide student information.
Their main reason, officials said, was a concern for student privacy.
But they also say that most rankings give misleading results to the scores of students applying to colleges each year.
"By their very nature, rankings present incomplete information," Wharton Dean Patrick Harker wrote in a 2004 article. "By generalizing definitions, they can present very misleading results, both for prospective students and recruiters."
"Some publications change methodologies from year to year, leading to speculation that some rankings are driven more by editorial agendas than by objective data," Harker added. "We share these concerns."
And it looks like Wharton students may actually agree with Leville - not their dean.
"I think that Wharton means well but the stance they've taken isn't productive," said Wharton and Engineering junior George Lin. " also don't see a privacy issue here. There are enough people out there who have my e-mail address anyway - I already get so much spam."
