The concept of an MBA feeder school

I have heard several discussions recently about the attractiveness of schools, and in rating a school higher because it is an “MBA feeder” school. The way that the rankings usually have it is that a “good” MBA feeder school has a high percentage of its graduates attend an MBA program; you can guess what a school might look like for it to rank low on this scale. I gotta tell you that I do not understand why this is used as a way to rank undergraduate business schools. And don’t think this is just sour grapes. Ross generally does well on such rankings.

Here are the different scenarios that I can come up with for a student who graduates from Ross:

• A student graduates from Ross. Gets a job, loves it, gets big raises. Happy with career. Never goes back to school. Might become president of the world, for all we know. Note that this counts as a negative in the MBA feeder school ranking since this person never gets an MBA.
• A student graduates from Ross. Gets a job, hates it, changes jobs and industries through personal contacts. Happy with new career. Never goes back to school. Note that this also counts as a negative.
• A student graduates from Ross. Gets a job, hates it, goes back and gets a masters degree in social work. Happy with career. This also counts as a negative.
• A student graduates from Ross. Gets a job, hates it, goes back and gets a Masters in Financial Engineering (from an engineering school) or a Masters in Supply Chain (from a business school!) or gets a J.D. (from a law school) and works in corporate law. All three of these count as a negative.
• A student graduates from Ross. Gets a job, loves it but can’t be promoted because of company policy that requires an MBA. Goes back to school. Student may or may not end up liking new job. This counts as a positive.
• A student graduates from Ross. Gets a job, hates it, goes back and gets an MBA. Student may or may not end up liking new job. This counts as a positive.

How is it that the first four don’t help Ross while the last two are good for us? It’s not whether or not a person changes careers or jobs. It’s not whether or not a person made a good career choice out of undergrad. It’s not whether or not a person goes back to school and ends up getting a job in business. It’s not how successful he or she is after getting the BBA. It’s not how successful he or she is after getting the MBA. The only things that count as positives are if a student graduates from our school and, for some reason, feels that he or she must get an MBA. It’s simply the fact that the BBA student ended up getting an MBA. This is the measure of success.

One way to ensure that a school does poorly on such a ranking is to place its graduates in jobs that they will love and will get promoted in. Two ways to ensure that a school does well on such a ranking is 1) to place its graduates in jobs that they will hate or 2) to place its graduates in companies that require MBAs in order to be promoted.

Does this make sense? Should this be something that influences how highly an undergraduate business program is ranked and, through its influence, how attractive the program is perceived to be?

The top business schools: Recruiters' MBA picks

The Wall Street Journal just came out with its annual ranking of business schools. This ranking is based on evaluations by over 4000 recruiters (completed in early 2006). Ross again did well, ranking #1 for the second time in the last three years. While this is a ranking of MBA programs, it is the ranking that is most closely related to the BBA program. As such I see it as something that I am proud of and think reflects well on the BBA Program. I covered this topic the last time the WSJ ranked us #1, and I’ll repeat my comments here:

...We sell recruiters on the “one-stop-shopping” nature of the University. If they want MBAs, we got ’em; if they want BBAs, we got ’em; if they want engineering students, we got ’em; ditto for LS&A, computing, English, etc. Having a BBA program makes the University more attractive to recruiters than it would be otherwise. And it’s not like the BBA program is the weak sibling of the bunch: it's always ranked in the top 3 or so of any list that I’ve ever seen.

Furthermore, if recruiters come here for MBAs and like, they are (more than likely) also here recruiting BBAs and enjoying the services of our top-notch Career Development office. Speaking of which, the high-quality service of OCD is shared by BBAs and MBAs alike. All of the corporate relationships and alumni and data that are available for MBAs are naturally available to BBAs. This means that you are the beneficiary of services that wouldn’t be there were it not for the fact that we have to support such a large number of students (BBA, Day MBA, evening MBA, MAcc).

Thus, while this ranking isn’t for the BBA Program, students in that program benefit from it.

I gotta tell you, it’s really nice to be able to re-run (with reasonable frequency) text that I use to celebrate one #1 ranking in another column celebrating another #1 ranking. It’s an abundance of riches that we have around here.