Times Higher Education and Wall Street Journal to Launch B-School Rankings
Times Higher Education have announced that they will team up with the Wall Street Journal to create a new set of business school rankings. The first edition of the rankings will debut in Spring 2018.
THE is known for its yearly ranking of international universities. And THE and WSJ already collaborate on college rankings that they publish annually. Now, the two plan to expand their partnership into B-school rankings.
Besides ranking MBA programs, the THE/WSJ business school rankings will cover two other kinds of increasingly popular graduate business programs: the Master’s of Finance and the Master’s of Management.
Matt Symonds, an editorial consultant for the new rankings, said that although these master’s programs had experienced “tremendous growth in global demand,” applicants still had “few opportunities … to take a deeper dive into the strengths of each program and to evaluate graduate outcomes.”
He added that THE had done a survey of applicants from over 35 countries and identified a “need for better and more reliable information,” which is partly what prompted the new rankings.
THE and WSJ are still in the process of developing the methodology for their new rankings, but they are currently considering a system that would rank schools in four main areas: outcomes, resources, engagement and environment.
“Outcomes” would have to do with how students in each program fare in terms of measures like post-graduation salary and employer reputation. In this regard, the THE/WSJ rankings would mirror other B-school rankings, which consider alums’ salaries as an important variable in evaluating programs.
The “resources” metric would look at things like how much schools devote to each student financially, how qualified faculty are, and how much access students have to faculty.
Meanwhile, the “engagement” category would include whether students tend to recommend a given program and how often students have opportunities to engage in collaborate projects or research.
Finally, the “environment” metric would involve how schools stack up in several different measures of diversity. These include economic diversity, gender diversity of students and faculty, and international diversity.
The specifics of the methodology are still being hashed out, and THE is currently soliciting feedback from business schools. The actual data gathering for the first round of rankings will begin in the fall, with the rankings coming out in spring of 2018.
For more information about the new rankings, see the THE website.