Moving Up in the Rankings case study Business schools seem to have lost the ability to evaluate their own quality and ef

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Moving Up in the Rankings case study
Business schools seem to have lost the ability
to evaluate their own quality and
effectiveness. With the emergence of
rankings of business schools in the popular
press, the role of judging quality seems to
have been captured by publications such as
Business Week, U.S. News and World Report,
and the Financial Times. The accreditation
association for business schools, AACSB,
mainly assesses the extent to which a school
is accreditable or not, a 0-1 distinction, so a
wide range in quality exists among accredited
business schools. More refined distinctions
have been made in the popular press by
identifying the highest rated 50, the first,
second, or third tiers, or the top 20. Each
publication relies on slightly different criteria
in their rankings, but a substantial portion of
each ranking rests on name recognition,
visibility, or public acclaim. In some of the
polls, more than 50 percent of the weighting
is placed on the reputation or notoriety of the
school. This is problematic, of course,
because reputation can be deceiving. One
recent poll rated the Harvard and Stanford
undergraduate business programs among the
top three in the country, even though neither
school has an undergraduate business
program. Princeton's law school has been
rated in the top five in several polls, even
though, you guessed it, no such law school
exists. Other criteria sometimes considered in
various ranking services include student
selectivity, percent of students placed in jobs, starting salaries of graduates, tuition costs
compared to graduates' earnings,
publications of the faculty, student
satisfaction, recruiter satisfaction, and so on.
By and large, however, name recognition is
the single most crucial factor. It helps predict
the number of student applicants, the ability
to hire prominent faculty members, fund-
raising opportunities, corporate partnerships,
and so on. Many business schools have
responded to this pressure to become better
known by creating advertising campaigns,
circulating internal publications to other
business schools and media outlets, and
hiring additional staff to market the school.
Most business school deans receive an
average of 20 publications a week from other
business schools, for example, and an editor
at Business Week reported receiving more
than 100 per week. Some deans begrudge the
fact that these resources are being spent on
activities other than improving the
educational experience for students and
faculty. Given constrained resources and
tuition increases that outstrip the consumer
price index every year, spending money on
one activity precludes it from being spent on
others. On the other hand, most deans
acknowledge that this is the way the game
must be played. As part of a strategy to
increase visibility, one business school hired
world-renowned architect Frank O. Gehry to
design a new business school building.
Photographs of models of the building are
reproduced below. It is a $70 million building that houses all the educational activities of
the school. Currently, this particular school
does not appear in the top 20 on the major
rankings lists. However, like about 75 other
business schools in the world, it would very
much like to reach that level. That is, the
school would like to displace another school
currently listed in the top 20. One problem
with this new landmark building is that it is sr
unusual, so avant-garde, that it is not even
recognized as a building. Upon seeing a
photograph for the first time, some people
don't even know what they're looking at. On
the other hand, it presents an opportunity to
leapfrog other schools listed higher in the
rankings if the institution is creative in its
approach. The challenge, of course, is that n
one is sure exactlv how to make this happen.
3.13. What conceptual blocks are getting in the way?( subject is leadership)