爱恨交织：商学院与排行榜的那些不为人知的秘密

    从收到的申请人数量和质量，到来校招聘的雇主数量和质量，这些一年一度或两年一度的排行榜影响着一所商学院的方方面面。它们甚至会影响教师招聘工作。明尼苏达大学(University of Minnesota)卡尔森管理学院(Carlson School of Management)院长斯里拉塔•查希尔讲过这样一个故事：一位年轻且极具潜力的中国学者决定不加入卡尔森管理学院，原因是她的母亲恳求她接受一所排名更高的商学院的聘书，尽管她的专业（管理信息系统）是卡尔森管理学院的优势学科之一。

    “几乎所有学校都对排行榜既爱又恨，”印第安纳大学(Indiana University)凯利商学院( Kelley School.)院长艾达琳•克斯纳坦言。“当这些排行榜对你有利的时候，你就满心欢喜，对你不利时你就会垂头丧气。很长时间以来，我们一直认为，好的表现注定会带来好名次。但现在，我们终于意识到了一个事实：我们需要关注排行榜本身。”

    一方面，商学院非常依赖排行榜，将它作为一个与同类院校进行比较的标尺，学生的第三方向导，以及一种营销工具。另一方面，排行榜的泛滥导致广泛的疲劳，严重消耗了时间和资源，排名急转直下甚至可能会引发一场公关灾难。太多的申请人仅仅关注表面名次，他们所不知道的是，任何排名或许只是某位对商业教育不甚了解的记者所做的主观判断的结果。

    马尔科姆•格拉德威尔在《纽约客》(New Yorker )一篇谈论高校排行榜的重量级文章中回忆过一段轶事：密歇根州最高法院前首席法官托马斯•布伦南给大约100名律师散发了一份非正式调查表。从哈佛、宾州州立大学(Penn State )到约翰•马歇尔法学院(John Marshall)，他要求这些律师列举十大法学院榜单。律师们最终把宾州州立大学排在了各自榜单的中间位置。问题是，宾州州立大学那时根本没有设立法学院。格拉德威尔最后总结说：“声誉评级只不过是从一所高校广泛且易于观察的身份特征中简单推论而来的结果。这些特征包括它的历史，媒体形象和建筑风采等等。所以说，这些评级带有根深蒂固的偏见。”

    各类排行榜进一步延续了这些假设。我们不妨就以《商业周刊》的在职MBA排行榜为例：这份杂志邀请各大商学院EMBA项目主管列举他们眼中的“最佳”项目，并按照从1到10的顺序排出名次——在最终发布的排行榜中，他们的评估意见占35%的权重。毫无疑问，这些主管纷纷引用各类排行榜作为评估同类院校的依据，由此创造了一个自我实现的预言。

    塔克商学院负责战略措施的副院长彭妮•帕克特称其为“选美比赛”。“人们往往投票支持自己所在院校，他们的个人喜好并不一定建立在对学校的真正了解之上，”她说。“当你被要求从200所候选院校中挑出所在领域的十大院校时，你会怎么做？你那样做有什么依据？”

    These annual or biennial lists affect everything from the number and quality of applications a business school receives to the quantity and quality of employers who recruit there. They even have an influence on faculty recruitment. Srilata Zaheer, dean of the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, tells the story of a young and highly promising Chinese scholar who decided not to join the Carlson faculty because her mother implored her to take an offer from a higher ranked school--even though her discipline--management information systems--is a major strength at Carlson.

    "Nearly all schools have a love-hate relationship with rankings," concedes Idalene "Idie" Kesner, dean of Indiana University's Kelley School. "You love them when they go in your direction, and you are frustrated when they don't. For a long time, we said that if you do good things, the rankings will follow. We have woken up to the fact that we need to focus on the rankings in and of themselves."

    On the one hand, B-schools rely on rankings as a benchmark against their peers, a third-party guide for students, and a marketing tool. On the other, a proliferation of rankings has created widespread fatigue, a serious time and resource drain, and a potential PR disaster when numbers take a nosedive. Too many applicants take them at face value, not understanding that the results of any ranking might be based on little more than the subjective judgments of a journalist, with little, if any, understanding of business education.

    In his pivotal New Yorker piece on rankings, Malcolm Gladwell recalls an anecdote in which Thomas Brennan, a former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, sent out an informal survey to roughly 100 lawyers. He asked them to rank a list of 10 law schools, ranging from Harvard and Penn State to John Marshall. The attorneys positioned Penn State in the middle of the pack. The problem? Penn State didn't have a law school at the time. "Reputational ratings are simply inferences from broad, readily observable features of an institution's identity, such as its history, its prominence in the media, or the elegance of its architecture. They are prejudices," Gladwell concludes.

    These assumptions are perpetuated through rankings. Take, for instance, BusinessWeek's Executive MBA ranking: EMBA program directors are asked to identify the "best" programs and rank them from 1 to 10 -- this assessment amounts to 35% of the final ranking. Directors no doubt reference the rankings to assess their peers, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Penny Paquette, Tuck's assistant dean for strategic initiatives, calls it a "beauty contest." "People vote for themselves, they have personal preferences that are not necessarily based on true knowledge of the school," she says. "When you're asked to pick the top 10 schools in this field out of a list of 200, how do you do that and on what basis do you do that?"