MBA News: Malcolm Gladwell (and mbaMission) Takes On the Rankings

mbaMission has long criticized MBA rankings because of their arbitrary nature and their inability to measure qualitative data (see yesterday’s blog entry, “The Financial Times Rankings: London on Top, but Does It Matter?”).  In this week’s New Yorker, acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell joins the ranks of critics as he dissects the college rankings in his article “The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us”, declaring that rankings are a self-fulfilling prophecy and that they frequently measure not the best schools but the biases of those who perform the rankings. As we noted yesterday, we recognize that rankings will “live on,” but Gladwell’s article certainly gets to the heart of the problem and raises important questions.