Gratitude in Graduate MBA Attitudes: Re-Examining the Business Week Poll

Abstract

As the strategic commitment to customer orientation has penetrated all aspects of corporate life, including business education, various publications (e.g., Business Week) increasingly have been conducting polls that rank schools on criteria that include evaluations by their former students. These student evaluations reflect certain objective characteristics of the schools as well as a remaining positive or negative residual that may be attributed to gratitude or ingratitude. In this study, the author investigated how business schools would be ranked in such polls if graduates' assessments reflected the schools' objective characteristics free from the biases of gratitude or ingratitude. Results show that some schools' rankings would drop precipitously, whereas others' rankings would rise.