Harvard, Stanford, Other Elite Business Schools Skip Some Rankings This Year Due To COVID-19, But Not The U.S. News Rankings To Be Released Next Month

Following up on my previous posts:

• Businessweek Suspends MBA Rankings Due To COVID-19; Will US News Follow Suit? What About Law School Rankings?
• Bob Morse On The Possible Suspension Of The U.S. News Law School Rankings Due To COVID-19

Wall Street Journal, What’s the Best Business School? For This Year’s M.B.A. Rankings, It’s Not Who You Think.:

As Harvard, Stanford, other elite schools skip some rankings this year, European universities top lists, lesser-known programs get a boost.

Several top U.S. business schools are skipping popular M.B.A. rankings this year, upending an annual rite for programs and prospective students.

Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Columbia Business School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, among others, opted to skip the most recent rankings by the Economist and the Financial Times. Several schools said Covid-19 made it difficult to gather the data they must submit to be ranked. ... 

Overall, 62% of programs plan to participate in some rankings, while 10% don’t plan to cooperate for any lists this year, according to a survey of business-school admissions officials by Kaplan, the education subsidiary of the Graham Holdings Co.

Bloomberg Businessweek suspended its 2020 ranking, the only major list to do so. Dozens of notable schools were missing from the Economist’s list published last month. Nine schools that normally take part in the FT’s list chose not to participate, a spokeswoman said. ...

U.S. News & World Report will publish its popular ranking as usual in March, said its chief data strategist, Robert Morse. He declined to say whether any schools had opted out.

Harvard, Stanford and Columbia, which have frequently ranked in the top 10, said they are participating in the U.S. News ranking, in part, because it is less time-consuming.

Poets & Quants, B-School Rankings Boycott Begins To Collapse For Financial Times:

The vast majority of the top business schools have cooperated with the forthcoming global MBA ranking of the Financial Times

The M7 boycott of The Economist’s MBA ranking has failed to hold for the forthcoming list by the Financial Times which will unveil its new global ranking on Monday (Feb. 8). Many business schools which refused to cooperate with The Economist have played ball with the FT this year, including Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg, Yale, Dartmouth Tuck, INSEAD and London Business School.

All told, 20 of the schools that had shunned The Economist cooperated with this ranking (see table below). ... A total of 143 schools took part in the 2021 edition of the ranking. ... Even so, some of the biggest names in business education will be missing from the FT’s 2021 ranking which is scheduled to come out on Monday. Among the most notable are Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, MIT Sloan, Columbia and UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Their absence will undoubtedly lead to some fascinating—and entertaining-changes in the annual ranking that is the most influential in Europe and Asia.

The high level of participation bodes well for this year’s U.S. News ranking. After considering a request to postpone its MBA ranking due to the pandemic, U.S. News & World Report decided in October to move ahead with its annual list that would come out in March of next year. U.S. News would clearly have more leverage because its ranking is the most read and watched list of U.S. MBA programs. Last year, in fact, Harvard Business School surveyed its MBA students to see which rankings mattered most to them. U.S. News came out on top. Some 74% of the responding HBS students said they consulted the U.S. News list while applying to business school, while 46% said the publication’s rankings influenced their school choices.