The Goizueta Business School was ranked ninth among national undergraduate business schools in an April 4 Bloomberg Businessweek report.
This is the ninth consecutive year in which the BBA program has ranked within the top 10. Goizueta's undergraduate program was ranked third in 2011, fifth in 2012 and seventh in 2013.
"In the grand scheme of rankings, it is not a really big change," Patrick McBride, president of the BBA Council and B-school Senior said. "If you look over the history of the Businessweek rankings, the rankings follow the same pattern it has always followed."
According to Senior Associate Dean and BBA Program Director Andrea Hershatter, the ranking system is broken down into four components: a student survey rank, an employer survey rank, MBA feeder school rank and an academic quality rank. The student survey rank was determined through surveys sent to graduation seniors regarding teaching quality, faculty and career services, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
The employer survey polled recruiters and asked them to determine which schools had the best graduates. The MBA feeder school rank was measures to show which schools send the most grads to the top MBA programs. The academic quality rank includes average SAT scores, the ratio of full-time students to faculty, and average class size and the percentage of business majors with internships.
While the student survey rank increased from No. 22 in 2013 to fifth in 2014, the employer survey rank decreased to No. 43. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the MBA feeder school rank and the academic quality rank were ninth and fifth, respectively.
According to Hershatter, the student survey rank increased in part due to recent changes implemented in the B-School such as a new BBA portal and Goizueta Input Groups, an imitative to provide guidance and ideas related to BBA services.
"We were very fortunate that we went way up in the student survey ranking from last year because the slight changes in methodology for the recruiter ranking really hurt us. Our smaller employer rate is because we only graduate 300 students each year," Hershatter said.
According to McBride, the recruiter ranking isn't reflective of how Goizueta students interact with employers because the survey goes to a head recruiter who may have never interacted with Emory before.
"It is putting small schools or schools that are far away from a company's headquarters at a huge disadvantage because they are not being ranked by the same person who is interacting with the school," McBride said.
Hershatter explained that every year the program works to increase offerings resulting in measurable positive metrics, such as the quality of students coming in, number of applicants and successful placements. She claims that these are increasing year over year.
"I feel very good about everything that we are doing, but I wish the survey results were more robust," Hershatter said.
According to Andy Ie, a College sophomore, staff photographer for the Wheel and a prospective Business School student, "there is reason to worry about the downward trend. However, still being in the top 10 won't make that much of a difference. "
According to the BBA Career Management Center, there was a 97 percent placement rate and a $64,250 average starting salary for the Class of 2013.
According to Steve Walton, associate professor in the Practice of Information Systems & Operations Management and professor of Data and Decision Analytics, there's natural variation in rankings over time and a change of a few places might be statistical error. A move up or down of two places is probably an example of this statistical error, he said.
"Methodologically, rankings can never answer the question of how different we are from the rest of the top schools," Walton said. "The data that sits underneath any ranking is pretty subtle. You just have to be careful when interpreting rankings data."
- By Brandon Fuhr
Updated at 11:10 a.m., Tuesday, April 8.
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