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Written by: Cody Brumfield
Published: 09/28/2005 Harvard Business School, Wharton Refuse Newspaper Ranking Information Requests
Citing privacy concerns and wasted staff time, two prestigious business schools are refusing information requests from several publishers of business school rankings.
The decisions by Harvard Business School and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania may have a significant effect on other institutions. There is, as yet, no single questionnaire for information provided in business school rankings, which have multiplied significantly since BusinessWeek created the first one in 1988. Information requests now arrive with such frequency, many schools have a dedicated staff member working as many as three days a week responding.
Will the omission of two well-known institutions from the rankings spur cooperation between publishers and eventually a reduction in extra staff hours and intrusive requests. That remains to be seen. However, the decisions by Wharton and HBS are already having an effect on rankings. The Economist Intelligence Unit recently published lists without the two institutions, prompting an explanatory article in the EIU's sister publication, The Economist. Also, the Financial Times was forced to omit HBS and Wharton in a recent article ranking Executive M.B.A. programs.
How the reputations and enrollments of the two institutions will be affected is also unclear, but any change is likely to be negligible. According to The Economist magazine, both HBS and Wharton have excellent reputations and produce influential publications that will help maintain their place among prestigious institutions. Additionally, as business school lists have proliferated and contradicted one another, rankings in general have lost much of the credibility they once had and as a consequence, students pay them less and less attention.
Nevertheless, The Economist notes, while the lists themselves are made mostly to grab reader attention, the publications they aim to sell often provide a wealth of useful information to potential students.
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