GMAC launches MBA ranking guide, use it to choose the right college

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) recently unveiled its User’s Guide to Full-Time MBA Rankings, a comprehensive online tool designed to help prospective graduate business students better understand the ranking methodologies established by five well-known publications.

Housed on mba.com, the guide summarizes and compares the content included in each of the five ranking methodologies.

“Our research shows that individuals applying to graduate management education programs consider rankings an influential part of their decision-making process,” said Sangeet Chowfla, president and CEO of GMAC.

“Though rankings exist to provide useful information to judge the quality of MBA programs, the existence of multiple rankings contributes to confusion among applicants. We created this resource to clarify the differences among the various rankings, as no one ranking methodology can speak to the individual needs and aspirations of every candidate considering a business degree.”

Rankings are appealing to applicants because they provide some level of clarity and order to a marketplace of business schools that is highly complex. They curate diverse data points from a variety of sources into a simple, easily comparable measure of overall quality.

The inherent issue with rankings, however, is that quality is highly subjective and there is no universally agreed upon way to measure it. For that reason, multiple rankings exist for full-time MBA programs, each with its own methodology that draws upon a different mix of data indicators and weights.

This interactive guide highlights each of the five major rankings (Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, The Financial Times, Forbes and U.S. News & World Report) by breaking down their methodologies across standardized weighting categories, identifying distinctive aspects of each ranking, and presenting a compilation of other useful ranking information and analysis.

The guide also provides the following information useful in zeroing on a desirable college:

• Understanding how rankings change year to year.
• A description of which schools are included in each publication’s full-time MBA ranking;
• GMAC data on how many students around the world use each ranking and how influential it is to their decision making;
• Publication dates and frequency for each ranking;
• Ranking history;
• Accessibility of rankings data;
• Additional business school rankings produced by each publication; and
• The full-time MBA rankings for each of the five publications.

   
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