I recently contributed to a thread on the "Poets & Quants" web page on the topic of MBA rankings (http://poetsandquants.com/2014/03/06/top-10-secure-in-new-u-s-news-ranking/). A point that I made there was that many people are focused on the latest rankings and do not consider any historical data on trend analysis.
So, I thought I'd take a look at the BW rankings over time and see what they describe. There's many ways to analyze this data (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-15/best-b-schools-ranking-history) but here are a few observations (US data only, 1988-2012, 13 rankings).
In the history of the BW rankings there have only been 11 different schools that have ever been ranked in the Top 5 (the number of times in the Top 5 and average ranking shown):
- Kellogg (13/13 times, average rank 2.23)
- Wharton (13/13 times, average rank 2.62)
- Harvard (13/13 times, average rank 3.31)
- Booth (10/13 times, average rank 3.77)
- Ross (5/13 times, average rank 5.77)
- Stanford (6/13 times, average rank 6.23)
- Fuqua (1/13 times, average rank 9.08)
- MIT Sloan (1/13 times, average rank 9.77)
- Tuck (1/13 times, average rank 10.23)
- Darden (1/13 times, average rank 11.15)
- Johnson (1/13 times, average rank 11.23)
- Wharton (13/13 times, average rank 2.62)
- Harvard (13/13 times, average rank 3.31)
- Booth (10/13 times, average rank 3.77)
- Ross (5/13 times, average rank 5.77)
- Stanford (6/13 times, average rank 6.23)
- Fuqua (1/13 times, average rank 9.08)
- MIT Sloan (1/13 times, average rank 9.77)
- Tuck (1/13 times, average rank 10.23)
- Darden (1/13 times, average rank 11.15)
- Johnson (1/13 times, average rank 11.23)
If we arbitrarily eliminate the schools that broke into the Top 5 only once, that means that there are only six US business schools that have managed to be ranked in the Top 5 by BW more than once. Moreover, the 60% of the schools ranked among the Top 5 in the US since 1988 have not changed! This means that only three schools have always been in the Top 5 (Kellogg, Wharton, Harvard) and generally three other schools have fought over the other two slots (Booth, Ross, Stanford) for 24 years.
To be sure, there's lots of ways to analyze this data (e.g., the variability of one school's rankings over time; the direction of the trend of one school's ranking over time). I think that the observations shared above, however, underscore how little new data really appear in any rankings.
