Forbes’ journalism on MBA rankings is lacking

John Byrne, the editor in chief of Poets&Quants, a site that covers business schools, writes Friday that Forbes recent release of its MBA school rankings was shoddy journalism.

Byrne, who once oversaw BusinessWeek’s business school rankings, writes, “The main story describing the results of the ranking is a poorly written and poorly organized article, something you are more apt to see in a mediocre high school newspaper. In that story only one change in the new ranking is cited: Harvard displacing Stanford as the number one school. There is no explanation why.

“Of the ten skimpy paragraphs in this primary story, only two even address the ranking itself. Most of the story is a grab bag of often unrelated statistics reported elsewhere by other organizations from the Graduate Management Admission Council or Universum, the consulting firm, or useless information. Not a single person was quoted in the story, perhaps because no one was interviewed for it.

“And the publication’s explanation of its methodology for the project, appearing in a one-paragraph story, is incomplete and unclear. Example: ‘We adjusted the median ‘5-year MBA Gain’ for cost of living expenses and discounted their earnings gains using a rate tied to money market yields.’ What exactly that means is open to question. There is no example that shows these adjustments in practice. Nor is there any further explanation about what Forbes means by adjusting numbers for ‘cost of living expenses.’

“The magazine says it also ‘discounted tuition to account for students who pay in-state rates and for the non-repayable financial aid that schools dole out.’ Forbes does not say how these adjustments impact a school’s ranking. It also fails to report where it gets the data on ‘financial aid.’ Some schools decline to report how much they give in scholarship money, making it impossible to fairly do what Forbes says it is doing.”

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