Abstract
Business school rankings have been criticized, to blindly “follow the money” with their strong focus on salaries and economic performance, thereby reflecting the values and expectations of the times the rankings were created. Rankings are increasingly seen as out of touch with changing demands on business and business schools to address issues of social impact and sustainability. The newly created Positive Impact Rating for Business Schools (PIR) provides an answer to these demands. This paper presents a case study on the new PIR. It first provides an overview of the critique of current business school rankings. It highlights emerging trends towards including social impact and sustainability in the business school landscape, with a focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, research initiatives, accreditations, and rankings. It then presents and discusses in detail the new PIR launched in January 2020 at the WEF in Davos and its initial reception. This new “by students and for students” rating reaches out to students to assess their own business schools on how they perceive them in creating a positive impact on and for the world.
Highlights
Critique of Current RankingsBusiness School rankings have been criticized for many years [1,2,3,4]
While Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) traditionally based their approach on universal values in the areas of human rights, labor rights, the environment, and anti-corruption, more recently they have started to focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
We present and discuss the concept and some results of the Positive Impact Rating for Business Schools (PIR) 2020 in detail by following five guiding questions (Table 2): Table 2
Summary
Business School rankings have been criticized for many years [1,2,3,4]. They largely “follow the money” [5] and reflect the values and expectations of the times when the rankings were created. While there is serious doubt if the rankings adequately reflect the performance of the schools, there is agreement that rankings have a significant influence on the demand for MBA programs. This shows in the fact that rankings have become an important aspect of the schools’ brands and business models. In the USA, U.S News comes in ahead of FT and Business Week ahead of the Economist [7] Both leading European rankings, FT and ECON, use quite similar ranking criteria, focusing heavily on salary and placement opportunities as can be seen from Table 1
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