When I attend Expos to promote my MBA Connect service I am asked many questions by people deciding whether to do an MBA and if so which one. In this section I will try to help people answer these questions using data and evidence found in the latest articles written about the topic.
One of the questions I am asked frequently is ‘Does Australia have a ranking system which I can use to compare Australian MBA programs and how useful are the international media ranking systems for deciding which Australian Program to study?”
The latest edition of the American-based Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAT) Newsletter has an article called ‘A Rating System to Define and Measure MBA Program Quality’ by Robert S. Rubin and Erich C. Dierdorff of DePaul University. In this article, they discuss the need for a new system of ratings to replace the ranking systems currently used, particularly in the US, Europe and the UK but increasingly in Australia, with some Australian universities chasing, and in some cases achieving a ranking on an overseas media list. These include the Financial Times 2011 Rankings, The Economist Rankings, Business Week Rankings 2010, while others participate in the AFR BOSS Magazine MBA rankings (biennial) or the GMAA ‘star’ system to try to indicate to potential students that their particular MBA Program is better than others on offer in Australia. Most of these ranking media have a page on their website explaining how their rankings are determined, but I do not believe many people look at this page as many just want to know the rank, not how it was determined!
Rubin and Dierdorff say although rankings purport to rank MBA Programs educational and academic quality, recent research has shown that they are “highly suspect in depicting educational quality”. They argue it is time the essential criteria determining academic quality were determined and following on from this vital first step that a transparent rating system be created to reflect those criteria.
I have long argued that current rankings disadvantage countries, such as Australia where many MBAs are targeted at a difference audience from those in some other parts of the world. For example, in Australia the average MBA student is 35 years old and has an average of 10 years work experience, most study part-time and many by distance education or online. Some criteria used by rankings media are not relevant to these Programs and they are ‘marked down’ because of this.
On the section of the MBA Connect website entitled ‘How do I choose which MBA programs best meets my needs?’ there is a table adapted from Regina Mitchell’s ‘Guide to NZ MBA Programmes’ which I suggest students use to determine which criteria are important to them. I then suggest they rate each criterion and use this as a method of narrowing down which MBA best meets their own needs. Perhaps more importantly, this method helps people to get clear in their own mind just which criteria are important to them personally.
I suggest they might want to look at such criteria as their personal objectives, the impact of study on family commitments, the flexibility of study options, subject choice and location, reputation and program quality, MBA Program costs and what they feel about the ‘fit’ of an MBA Program when they speak to staff at each university, read a brochure or visit a website.
Rubin and Dierdorff undertook a great deal of research using the academic literature, media sources, accreditation standards and also the reactions to assessing quality from MBA policy makers, such as program administrators, associate deans, etc, and came up with the following content synopsis of their quality model:
- Curriculum: (a) content, (b) delivery, and (c) program structure
- Faculty: (a) qualifications, (b) research, (c) teaching, and (d) overall quality
- Placement: (a) alumni network, (b) career services, and (c) corporate/community relations.
- Reputation: (a) perceptions of program quality
- Student learning and outcomes: (a) personal competency development, (b) student career consequences, (c) economic outcomes, and (d) learning outcomes
- Institutional resources: (a) facilities, (b) financial resources, (c) investment in faculty, (d) tuition and fees, and (e) student support services
- Program/institution climate: (a) diversity and (b) educational environment
- Program student composition: (a) the overall makeup and quality of students
- Strategic focus (a) the quality of the articulated institutional mission and strategic plan
They found at least 60 percent of the criteria are not represented in current international ranking systems and suggest a new ratings system would have many benefits including: allowing stakeholders to evaluate the full breadth of quality and apply their own weighting to what matters most for them; improving transparency and allowing differences to emerge across programs; and, reducing the dysfunctional behaviour involved in chasing or manipulating the most heavily weighted criteria in media rankings. In my view this would be a great improvement on the current rankings systems and something I hope will be taken up.
While we wait and see if a ratings system is developed you will need to do your own investigations about the quality of MBA Programs, perhaps using the nine groups of criteria listed above and the template on the MBA Connect website. The reputations of teaching staff, peer review methods for teaching materials, the nature of academic and administrative support are often useful indicators of quality and recent MBA graduates’ opinions of their overall satisfaction and reception in the marketplace are very useful as well.