Salocin

Wharton tumbles from top spot

The Wharton School, that I am currently attending as a graduate, takes a tumble in the businessweek rankings (free registration required).

It's pretty damning on the face of it. A fall from number one to number five in the BusinessWeek Rankings. Not that the BusinessWeek Rankings are everything one should care about, but thanks to some excellent marketing on their part, Businessweek have managed to shove their MBA scoresheet firmly into the MBA applicant's field of vision. So why did Wharton fall from the number one spot, and how important is it that it should have dropped?

People's reactions are funny. When you're number one, the rankings are always perfectly accurate, but should you fall, questions immediately get asked regarding the integrity or objectivity of the scoring process. Of course, no-one wants to look like they care, so whilst they're questioning the ranking methodology in one breath, they're claiming the rankings never really mattered anyway in the next. It's a different song to the one that I heard during my application process.

From what I hear, we dropped mostly because of the feedback given by the students of 2002. We also fared slightly less well with employers last year. This was something that the administration knew about and were already fixing when we arrived in September. Changes are being made in the recruitment office that co-ordinates our career-search with employers wanting to recruit on campus. There's a new director, things look like they'll improve, and so there's an element of lag in the rankings.

But why the disappointed students? It's not as if the careers office was dreadful, it just went through a difficult transition, and possibly became a little complacent given how easy it was to get jobs for students in a booming worldwide economy - more recently, the downturn in the economy meant there were fewer jobs, and there's only so much a careers office can to compensate for that. Additional diversity in the range of employee relationships they cultivate will help, as Wharton has been quite Banking, Consulting and US-centered in the past.

According to the things I've been reading and hearing, there also seems to be a problem with expectations. The economic downturn did a few things to employment prospects (and the situation's not getting any better), and this forced a number of people who thought they'd get their dream job to settle for something other than their first choice employer.

I guess it's a hard moment to pass when you realise that Wharton isn't the magic bullet that allows you to completely bypass the effects of an economic downturn. Those of us in the 2004 class are perhaps a little more realistic since we saw the state of the economy and the job market when we were applying. Getting into one of the top schools is never a sure thing, it was important to have other options at the time. Whilst there were jobs out there, the picture wasn't the same as 12 months earlier.

Does the ranking matter? Personally, I don't think so. There's a lot of noise made about how the brand of your school is so important, but my theory is that once you're through the door and into your career, your personal performance and abilities are the only life-raft you have in a slow market, and with another 800+ Wharton students and plenty of other quality post-MBAs out there, you better make sure it floats. So get what you came for: learn the skills and build the network, its more important than ever.