<p>Paulinedavis: I agree with your first statement that the recruiters the students are most interested might not be in the pool and I agree, and always have, in Sakky's points about the recruiters and students having divergent interests. And I never actually have argued that this is a particularly good ranking. </p>
<p>I do find it funny that you argue that a recruiter survey is suspect -- and that it puts schools in the wrong order -- because you as but one recruiter have a different view than what the survey produced. You may view Tuck and Yale and Haas as of the same caliber but apparently a much larger group of recruiters, and therefore even if not the pool we'd want still one that is broadly more representative than your private views or those of your company disagrees with you on average about Yale's placement in that mix. In other words, you're saying, "you really shouldn't listen to recruiters because they have vested interests and they'll get things wrong or purposely mislead. I'm one after all, and I know better." Well, if you're a recruiter and you just told me not to listen to recruiters, why should I listen to your one view rather than a group view? At least the group view has the virtue of representing a view of many averaged. And if they are touting the schools at which they find the greatest yields of the best students at the price they can offer, isn't that success in their world and therefore a fair thing to judge.</p>
<p>A student rating is, I think, much worse than a recruiters ranking 1) because students have a huge vested interest in the outcome of a survey -- much larger than that of a recruiter-- and 2) because one is asking a student to essentially compare one thing they are intimately familiar with with competitors that they only know by reputation or that they don't know about at all. Recruiters at least have experiences, usually, with a group of schools.</p>
<p>I think that we don't know a) who they surveyed b) what they actually asked, so this is all rather an academic argument.</p>
<p>But one important point I was making is that definitely there are some schools that have a virtuous mix of quality of student and professionalism of recruiting personnel. And this is important. Recruiters are customers on a very important level, and any organization that doesn't listen to its customers is missing a big point. On the other hand, students are customers too.</p>
<p>I had some other points to make, but I just don't have time.</p>
<p>VectorWega: I heard about that survey, but I didn't hear it was about the Wall Street Journal. I thought it was just making a point about brand name recognition in general vis-a-vis b-schools and surveyed the general public. I can't believe that a group of professional recruiters would actually believe that Princeton has a b-school. The recruiters that I've dealt with are much more switched on than that. Pick any 5 big companies: Goldman, Chevron, Wal-Mart, blah blah. They wouldn't have someone in that position, except perhaps in rare circumstances that is unaware of that market.</p>