USNews says Stanford is Number 1

USNews moves Stanford up to number 1 in the business school rankings. Tom and miro find a student commuting more than 20,000,000 miles for an MBA. And, the official MBA Stimulus Package is announced.

(1) Headlines: Self Worth Quantified

USNews Business School Rankings are Out. Stanford is # 1

Blowing Harvard out of the water by TYING them in every single metric used in the ranking scheme

Except for the least important one: acceptance rate.

Isn’t acceptance rate important? Not really, it’s only 1% of U.S. News’s Rating. The most important things by far are a peer review ranking (deans) and recruiter rankings. (Combined to make 40% of the score.)

The unprecedented 50 point plunge in the Crummer school of business. John Byrne over at Poets and Quants thinks that this is basicallyl due to volatility in the lower parts of the rankings.

We think he may have overlooked the more obvious explanation. It’s called the Crummer school of business.

How much money do you have to get from a donor before you name your school Crummer? My name is Terrible. I’d like to name your school.

Don’t all these rankings create a reinforcing cycle? If you rely on peer reviews, the top schools stay the top schools because everyone looks to this list.

This is the way rankings should be. The exerts in a field always know other experts in their field. So, if you poll experts, you’ll get a pretty good idea of who the top people are.

That has nothing to do with quality of education. You basically just reinvented the popular group in high school.

Yes, I did. But this time, for $150k and a 760 GMAT, you can now be a part of that group.

Finally, justice will be served! Oh chess club, you are finally paying off!

And if you play your cards right, you’ll soon be a member of the Scotch club.

Do we acutally have a Scotch club.

I’m CERTAIN we have a Scotch club.

(2) Business Porn: This week’s business porn is on frequent fliers.

As you know, many Executive MBA’s travel to get their degrees. Many travel from New York to Boston, for example.

Harsh Gupta, a student at Kellogg’s Exec Ed. Program, is commuting to Chicago from Dubai!

He’s traveling round trip every other week.

He’s traveling 14,512 miles per round-trip.

He’s traveling a total of 20 million miles to get his degree.

That’s like going to the moon and back 50 times.

Travel alone will be costing him $180k. That’s more than tuition!

(3) Jargon: Failure Mode

Failure mode; this is the most common form of failure in a system. Thats what differentiates it from the failure average or failure median.

Used in a business context, this is the most common ways in which a project fails to meet it’s goals.

So, you might say, a common failure mode of The MBA Show is when MiroKaz tries to make a math joke.

What I love about this term is that it is a non-threatening way to talk about what things can go wrong and avoid them. Have a conversation with your team about potential failure modes and how you will avoid them.

It’s a lot easier than saying how how is Jim going to screw this one up.

(4) Business School Tip of the Week: The MBA stimulus package.

So before we get to our tip. Let me outline a scenario for you. You’re a b-school student. You have no job and a huge amount of loans. You decided to go on a lavish vacation for spring break. How does that sound to you?

It seems like people are basically taking out loans to pay for vacation.

Would you recommend that?

No, that sounds like a terrible idea.

So what’s our business school tip of the week?

Take out a loan and go on vacation.

This pains me.

MBA’s, as you know, our economy isn’t doing so hot. One way to get out of this is to do what Americans do best. Spend baby spend. So this year, we’re calling spring break “The MBA Stimulus Package”. You’re welcome America.

Dude, you’re 100K in the hole. How is this possibly good idea?

In b-school time is precious. And in many b-school jobs is that time is EVEN MORE precious. For many people, this is the last opportunity you will get for a while to take this kind of time off.


(5) What’s on your Radar?
Miro: Going to Mexico
Tom: I’m going on a cruise in the west Caribbean.