Why The Wall Street Journal Rankings Are Bogus [A Takedown]
This week, the venerable Wall Street Journal tried its hand at ranking undergraduate schools, a slippery and notoriously contentious endeavor, and returned some wild results.
It may come as a surprise that perennial powerhouses Harvard, Duke, Columbia, NYU, Stanford, Wharton, the University of Chicago, and The University of Texas at Austin didn’t make the list of 25 schools that “top recruiters” prefer for filling entry-level jobs. What the?
UT marketing researcher Matt Turner was surprised, as were observers from Boston to L.A. who divined from the results that if you wanted to get a good job in business go to a state school (just not UT). Even Time was seduced.
Schools like Penn State (No. 1) and Texas A&M (No. 2) and Florida (No. 9) and Texas Tech (No. 18) loved the survey, of course. The question is whether it’s worth a darn.
Turner says no, and he took to the McCombs School blog yesterday to, how shall we say, raise some concerns with the methodology. It would be safe to summarize that Turner wonders what planet the Wall Street Journal is reporting on.
“The WSJ’s Top 25 Recruiter Picks flies in the face of everything we observe in our recruiting operations and anything that has been reported in other major publication rankings,” Turner wrote. “Only two rankings exist specifically for undergrad business programs: U.S. News & World Report and Bloomberg Businessweek. For the record, McCombs ranks no. 7 in the former and no. 10 in the latter.”
Even more curious, part of the Bloomberg Businessweek rankings is a survey of recruiters — just what the WSJ says it has done. How has Texas done on that survey recently? McCombs ranked 2 in 2010, 3 in 2009, 2 in 2008, 5 in 2007, and 5 in 2006.
The WSJ’s Top 25 Recruiter Picks flies in the face of everything we observe in our recruiting operations and anything that has been reported in other major publication rankings.
This isn’t the first time the WSJ has veered far from the norm in its fitful attempts at rankings. They used to rank MBA programs until multiple failures to develop a working methodology led them to abandon the effort in 2007, Turner said. “Year to year, the WSJ MBA ranking was a roller coaster ride for schools, with dramatic upswings and crashing descents utterly unconnected with real-world performance,” Turner wrote.
How about starting salaries? The median for McCombs undergrads is $54,000 a year. That’s between $7,000 and $9,000 better than A&M or Tech graduates.
Now, to be fair, Turner is responding on behalf of McCombs to a study that judged the entire university. Still, the starting salary numbers for a generic UT grad stack up with those of the best schools in the nation — certainly as well as A&M and Tech graduates — despite a much heavier emphasis at UT with educating liberal arts majors, social workers, and students who pursue graduate degrees in the humanities and sciences.
Turner has more to bark about, and you should read his whole post here, but just by way of passing shot, consider that the WSJ did not collect any data from the schools, it published no data points, and provided nothing that would allow for any quantitative comparison.
The WSJ said that, where possible, it pulled school-related data on number of students, tuition, application deadline, undergraduate enrollment, and admissions contact information directly from each institution’s website. In some cases, data was collected via school profiles on collegeboard.com.
But here’s a kicker: in the press release announcing the rankings, the Journal included a URL to its methodology that does not work. Huh, figures.
Photo by Val Cook
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8 Comments
There a lot of factors to consider in the rankings of university. I saw some reputable universities dropped a lot in their rankings. If I am not wrong, NTU dropped from 70th+ to 170th+ places. That’s a huge difference. However, I feel that they shouldn’t be too concerned about it. To me such rankings are uselss or bogus as you said.
An analysis of the U.S. News rankings for UT Austin (ranked #47 in 2010) reveals that the university benefits greatly from the quality of its professors, as reflected in peer assessment score, which is the most heavily weighted factor in the U.S. News ranking formula. UT Austin’s peer assessment score is significantly higher than that of most other institutions with a similar overall ranking score. And of course the professors in top programs such as engineering and business are perceived even more positively in peer assessment. However, UT Austin lags compared to the competition in student SAT scores and graduation and retention rank.
Unfortunately the WSJ article discussed above focuses on entry level hiring of students, not professors, so the university’s rating (in the 45 to 65 category, rather than the top 25) should not come as a great surprise. Of the schools that UT Austin considers peer institutions, those which did achieve a top-25 rank (Berkeley, Michigan, UNC, UCLA, and University of Wisconsin) all have significantly higher student SAT scores than UT Austin. That leaves UT Austin in the company of its remaining identified peer institutions (University of Washington- Seattle, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, MSU, and Indiana University) which also have lower student SAT scores and likewise placed in the “next 20” category. OSU was the only peer institution without the same correlation between WSJ ranking and student SAT scores.
Instead of spending so much effort and money attempting to raise the performance of students at the bottom who do not measure up, UT needs to weed out those without the intellectual ability or work ethic to succeed in college and send them to one of its CAP Program partners for remedial assistance or refer them to a two-year program that emphasizes work force skills. The focus on bringing up the bottom is what has caused so many Texas high schools to churn out students who are not college-ready, and UT Austin does have alternatives in dealing with this problem if it desires to do so. This WSJ article should be a wake-up call. Perhaps the university could give struggling students aptitude testing (similar to testing developed by Johnson-O’Conner) to help them identify other options that might give them more personal satisfaction and economic reward in life than bringing up the bottom of the bell curve at UT Austin.
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Interesting read, as I looked into similar articles and reviews when deciding on which college I would attend
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Wall street is making progress rapidly.Stock exchange business is on peak these days
Thank you for exposing these bogus rankings!
I think the real problem some people have with this approach is the answer. Some people spend ridiculous amounts on tuition for their children and it is painful to see information contradicting that ‘investment.’ The US News rankings are ridiculous. I have seen academic rankings where an expensive college without a math department, e.g., is ranked in the top ten in math?!