Hey guys. I have a question and I do not know want this to come out the wrong way like I only care about rankings or whatever. Okay, so why are some undergraduate business schools with excellent job placement rates and high salaries ranked so low? Two school in particular come to mind simply because I discovered this through these schools. Syracuse and Tulane University both have 100% job placements within three months after graduation with high starting salaries, yet they are ranked 55 and 74, respectively, by Bloomberg. Obviously, these rankings are not bad at all, but for those kind of statistics they should be much higher right? Am I wrong to say that the most important thing about undergraduate business school or college, in general, is getting a job that hopefully pays well? I am looking for some kind of logical explanation or reasoning as to why this is. Perhaps I am missing something, so if anyone has an idea, please share.
Google is your friend: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-04-04/best-undergraduate-business-schools-2014-methodology-for-how-we-ranked-the-schools
It doesn’t address Tulane or Syracuse specifically, but you can see what the rankings take into account and then decide if these factors matter to you. As with any ranking system, it’s the criteria that you are choosing to measure that determines the outcome. If the standard of ‘excellent’ is how much a school resembles Harvard for example, then it’s not surprising if Harvard is consistently ranked number 1 (which the routine complaint about USNWR rankings.) Obviously, if a ranking includes factors that you don’t think are important to you, then you might find that you rank schools very differently than whomever created the ranking in the first place.
And the information you are looking at, job placement and salary, are certainly reasonable measures to use in evaluating schools.