The Wall Street Journal has ranked the Fuqua School of Business as the 25th best business school in the nation, a significant jump from a 44th ranking last year. Despite the increase, however, many in the Fuqua community felt the ranking--only in its second year--was inaccurate and the research poorly conducted.
"It's not reflective at all [of the master of business administration program]," said Dan Nagy, associate dean for MBA program operations. "Other surveys like BusinessWeek and U.S. News and World Report, who have been doing this longer, are far more accurate with ranking the business schools. [The Wall Street Journal's] methodology has major flaws and is fairly new."
Douglas Breeden, dean of Fuqua, addressed the ranking in an e-mail sent out Monday to the Fuqua community. He referred to the rankings of several other top schools: Harvard University (No. 9), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (No. 30), the University of California at Los Angeles (No. 36), Stanford University (No. 39) and the London Business School (No. 45).
"I have always urged the Fuqua community to keep rankings such as this in their proper perspective, and that advice is highly relevant today," Breeden wrote.
The ranking was based on how business recruiters rated each school on 26 characteristics, as well as the number of respondents who said they recruited at a given school.
Dartmouth College's Tuck School was ranked first for the second year in a row. According to the article accompanying the rankings, however, most of the top 10 were larger schools, since recruiters said they were treated with more respect and enjoyed greater success in hiring there.
The article attributed the higher rankings for both Duke and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School to "strong mass-appeal scores" but added that recruiters made more complementary comments about both schools this year.
Fuqua Associate Professor Carl Mela, who studied last year's ranking along with Fuqua Professor John Lynch, said he found several problems with the methodology of the survey and began a preliminary analysis of this year's rankings.
"Large recruiters, who visit multiple schools, are only allowed to rank three of them," Mela said. "As smaller recruiters typically recruit at fewer schools, they carry disproportionate weight in the survey because they can rate all the programs at which they recruit. Moreover, schools can still affect the rankings by providing the name of 'close' recruiters who visit only a few schools. The small sample size can increase the variability of results, leading to low reliability."
Mela also noted that the current system average recruiters' rankings from last year with this year's. He estimated that if the effects of the 2001 survey were eliminated, Duke would rank 13th on the list.
"The bottom line is that the students who choose to attend Fuqua are of the highest caliber; these students validate the fact that Fuqua is in the top tier of business schools and not No. 25," wrote Greg Wurster, a second-year Fuqua student and representative to the Graduate and Professional Student Council, in an e-mail.
The Sept. 9 article also ranked Fuqua eighth for recruitment of minority students, based on the number of nominations it received over the past two years from recruiters who visited campus. Harris Interactive Inc. conducted the study, but a representative could not be reached for comment.
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