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BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
EDITORIAL
Is this distrust simply sour grapes among those placing lower than they would like to? Or has the rankings game gone pear-shaped beyond repair? At their essence, rankings should serve as inspiration for improvement. Doing ‘better’ in a ranking would in this sense be a reward for the fruits of a Business School’s labour. Yet, as Andrew Crane, Director of the Centre for Business, Organisations and Society in the School of Management at the University of Bath, UK, points out in this edition’s cover feature, a ranking today is typically not, ‘designed with any real vision of what Business Schools should be teaching, or the role they should be playing in society,’ and that consequently, it ‘will not push
Content Editor Tim Banerjee Dhoul t.dhoul@businessgraduates association.com Art Editor Laura Tallon Insight and Communications Executive Ellen Buchan e.buchan@ businessgraduates association.com Director of Marketing and Communications David Woods-Hale d.woods@businessgraduates association.com
C orporate
Are fruitful rankings – for Schools and society – attainable?
Business Development Manager Victor Hedenberg v.hedenberg@ businessgraduatesassociation.com Senior Marketing Executive -– BGA Daniel Kirkland d.kirkland@ businessgraduatesassociation.com BGA Membership Manager Rachael Frear r.frear@ businessgraduatesassociation.com Head of Commercial Relations Max Braithwaite m.braithwaite@ businessgraduatesassociation.com Commercial Partnerships Manager Emily Wall e.wall@ businessgraduatesassociation.com Finance and Commercial Director Catherine Walker Director of Accreditation and Director of BGA Services Mark Stoddard Chief Executive Officer Andrew Main Wilson Executive Assistant to the CEO Amy Youngs a.youngs@ businessgraduatesassociation.com General Enquiries info@businessgraduates association.com
Schools to behave in any desired way and nor will it
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consider how Business Schools will actually change in response to the ranking.’ However, Crane also suggests that a solution could be to have more rankings, not fewer. ‘The more this kind of fragmentation occurs, the more opportunities there are for digging deeper and devising better metrics to measure what really matters,’ he says. Far from fearing the addition of a new ranking, then, further scales of measurement could conceivably be a good thing. They just need to add value – not just to the market, but also to the question of business education’s impact on society. Tim Banerjee Dhoul,
At the time of writing, a newly released ranking of Business Schools has been met with criticism for its methodology and a claim that it adds no value to the market – more fuel to stoke the fire of disillusionment towards rankings felt by many. ‘Most of these lists are severely flawed, if not statistically meaningless… It’s why so many Business School deans express frustration, if not disgust, about the whole business of it,’ said John Byrne, editor-in-chief at Poets & Quants , writing in Forbes . It’s this very stance which informed AMBA & BGA’s foray into the realm of
rankings in 2019 when its Research and Insight Centre asked Are MBA rankings fit for purpose? Focusing on what is the flagship postgraduate degree for many Business Schools, that report found that 34% of 1,328 stakeholders polled (representing AMBA- accredited institutions, MBA students, graduates, and employers) felt that MBA rankings do not reflect an MBA’s performance ‘very well’ or ‘at all well’. Only 11% said they thought rankings reflect the true performance of an MBA ‘very well’. That is some disconnect given the attention these rankings often command.
Content Editor, Business Impact
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