A New Twist on Business School Rankings
Business schools need another ranking like they need a hole the head, right? I’d tend to agree, but here is something to get your head around — LinkedIn’s new twist on the tried and true rankings approach.
So what’s new? First, while most school rankings focus to one degree or another on “career outputs,” — most typically how many graduates of the school get jobs and how much they earn — this ranking considers a different kind of career output that changes the rules. LinkedIn simply asked, “who gets the best marketing jobs and where did they go to school?”
The bigger twist is that inXTT this ranking of “the best undergraduate programs for marketing,” the result is that there are schools ranked near the top, such as Harvard, that don’t even have an undergraduate business school. The criteria is based on where people actually go to work, with apparently no regard for the nature of the actual “educational mechanism” through which the student’s competencies were developed.
Of course, there is a lot of subjectivity and a lot of basis on which to level fair criticism of the method, but the idea itself is very interesting–and something only LinkedIn could do. I predict business schools should stay tuned on this one…..