Rankings

With another email coming out to the student body regarding Darden's latest position in whichever ranking was most recently released, I feel the need to go off on a slight, (tame) rant about B-school rankings.

I almost wish that all the magazines and websites didn't even bother to produce rankings, since they are actually not useful for anything more than students being able to say, "I attend a top X school." (X being one lower than whatever the highest ranking achieved by the school happens to be) People comparing Wharton to Yale, for example, are bound to be disappointed. Yes, it would be easy to say "well, Wharton is ranked #3 and Yale is ranked #15, therefore I should attend Wharton." However, if the potential applicant preferred something like non-profit management, then Wharton might not actually be the better choice.

So there's really no substitute for actually visiting schools, finding out how the courses are structured, getting a feel for the student body and making sure that the firms/companies you want to work for recruit from that school. If you do this, you may actually discover that the comparison of the Top 20 B-schools is more of a comparison of apples to oranges to pomegranates, rather than apples-to-apples.