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Stanford University’s business school

Poets & Quants, a website covering business schools, on Friday published a scathing critique of Bloomberg Businessweek’s M.B.A. rankings for this year, which were released last month.

The critique -- by Anjani Jain, deputy dean of the Yale School of Management -- charges that the rankings don’t match up with the weights the magazine says it uses.

The magazine did not respond to an email and a phone call from Inside Higher Ed.

Jain compared the numbers released by Bloomberg Businessweek with its rankings and wrote that the rankings “cannot be replicated by the published data and methodology.”

The rankings are supposed to be based on five criteria: compensation, learning, networking, entrepreneurship and diversity.

Compensation is the most important, but Jain said that it’s much more important than Bloomberg Businessweek admits. The magazine claims that it accounts for 37.5 percent of the rankings, but Jain writes that it really counts for 58.5 percent of the rankings.

“For instance, on the ‘learning’ index of the ranking, Wharton and MIT are both in the bottom quartile among 84 U.S. schools (Wharton at rank 78, MIT at 64 -- I note this without editorial commentary). On the other hand, UT Dallas has the highest ‘learning’ score, ranking #1 on this index. If learning did contribute 25.8 percent to the overall score, Wharton and MIT would need to have dominant scores on the other indexes (which they don’t) to rise to their high overall ranks. I determined mathematically that the true ‘learning’ weight needs to be suppressed to 7.7 percent for the published ranking to be consistent with BBW’s index scores,” writes Jain.

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