NYU’s Stern School of Business
U.S. News has proven that ranking lists, which compare schools and universities against each other, cannot be accepted at face value. Case in point being the glaring fall of NYU Stern School of Business on a list issued by U.S. News and World Report, from a position of 11 last year to 20 this year.
Keith Riegert, Stern MBA 2017
The U.S. News ranking list is compiled by taking into consideration 300+ data points from hundreds of business schools. Stern’s shortcoming here was that it failed to provide one value. This omission cost Stern nine places on U.S. News’s rankings list, which is referenced by a number of students worldwide when they look to send out their applications. The value in question, according to Keith Riegert (Stern MBA 2017), has to have been Full-Time Average GMAT score weighted at 16.25%. You may be wondering how one missing value could have played such a large part in the whole incident. Well, in the absence of said data point, U.S. News went ahead and used the worldwide average of GMAT scores i.e. 560. However, this data point is 160 points lower than Stern’s average GMAT score of 720 – a value comparable to Stern’s last year’s GMAT average also.
U.S. News, the leader in U.S. business school rankings, seems to have taken the easy path instead of undertaking proper measures to estimate a value or working with Stern to obtain the missing data point. Investment Bankers would well be aware how using wrong assumptions can cause millions of dollars of differences in company valuations. While Stern is undoubtedly to blame, the modelers at U.S. News cannot wash their hands off the entire saga.
Peter Henry, NYU Stern Dean
NYU Stern’s Dean, Peter Henry, issued an official statement and clarification post the public release of the list, saying, “For both prospective students and current members of our community, I would ask you to bear in mind: in the real world Stern’s outstanding quality is no different this week than it was last week.”
Students and applicants seem to remain unfazed by this list and are in agreement with Dean Henry’s views of the quality of education at Stern. Riegert, also an author, expressed his disapproval of U.S. News openly saying, “Such careless treatment of data is baffling”. He also offered his services to U.S. News asserting, “My qualifications will include, among other things: An ethically sound ability to estimate missing data and a hard-earned MBA from what is, still and will be, one of the best business schools in the country.”
At Crack The MBA, we work with scores of exceptional candidates applying to leading global MBA programs. In our mind, Stern is a top 12 U.S. MBA program. This year, one of our candidates admitted to Ross and Stern unambiguously picked Stern over Ross, which is ranked 12th in the rankings. As a team, we stand by Stern and consider it to be a pre-eminent business school in the U.S. irrespective of what the 2017 rankings issued by U.S. News say.
