Businessweek Suspends MBA Rankings Due To COVID-19; Will US News Follow Suit? What About Law School Rankings?

Following up on my previous post, GMAC, Accreditors Seek To Postpone Business School Rankings During COVID-19:

Poets&Quants, Businessweek Agrees To Suspend Its MBA Ranking This Year:

Bloomberg Businessweek, which annually publishes one of the five most influential rankings of MBA programs, today (May 7) announced that it would suspend its 2020 ranking due to the disruptions caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Poets&Quants, Wimps: Will U.S. News Chicken Out & Pause Its MBA Ranking?:

The wimpy decision to pause one of the five most influential MBA rankings comes less than two weeks after the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the GMAT exam, and two business school accreditation agencies asked ranking organizations, including Businessweek, to halt their work and postpone the publication of their lists.

Sad to say, Businessweek‘s ranking has waned in importance over the years after a series of abrupt methodology changes and highly inconsistent an less-than-credible results. ... It is one thing, however, for Businessweek to pause its ranking–part of which is based on employment statistics that are more than a year old. It is an entirely another thing for U.S. News & World Report, the most followed MBA ranking in North America, or the Financial Times, the most influential ranking in Europe and Asia, to halt publication of their rankings. Both of these media organizations gather freshly issued metrics that help inform the applicant market, allowing candidates to compare and contrast these schools far beyond any numerical rank they are given.

In fact, the release of those metrics, made uniform by the reporting requirements imposed on schools by U.S. News and the FT, is especially critical in this year made turbulent by the coronavirus outbreak and the global recession. Transparency is more critical today than ever before. Applicants should have access to timely metrics that will likely show which schools have best weathered the storm at hand. ...

Bob Morse, chief data strategist for U.S. News, has told Poets&Quants that “the team at U.S. News continues to monitor the unprecedented disruptions to business schools themselves, their current students and prospective students caused by COVID 19.  As a result, we’re still reviewing our strategies for both our next U.S. News Full-time and Part-time Best Business Schools rankings and fall 2020 data collection.”

Our advice: Publish your rankings just as you would at any other time, just as you did during the 2008-2009 financial meltdown that led to the Great Recession.

For complete TaxProf Blog coverage of the coronavirus, see here.