Value-Added Adjustment In Undergraduate Business School Ranking

Abstract

In 2006, Business Week issued a highly publicized ranking of undergraduate business schools (Lavelle, 2006). Although the ranking provided useful measures of quality, the high rank of some schools was partly due to the quality of incoming students and educational resources rather than the ability of the school to add value. In this article, the authors derive a statistical frontier with alternative reranking of schools on the basis of value added. The authors ranked some schools high according to both measures, but other schools experienced a major increase in rank when the value-added adjustment was applied. The authors discussed implications for students, parents, and business schools.

Keywords:

• business
• college
• ranking
• salary
• SAT