Months after large-scale boycotts of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings by law and medical schools across the country rocked academia, many like the University of Pittsburgh are seemingly once again touting the importance of the designation.
On Tuesday, the news organization released the 2023-24 best business school rankings in which Pitt fell to 86th out of 134.
That’s a significant decrease from last year when the program sat at 55th and from three years ago when it came in at 39th, according to an email viewed by the Post-Gazette from Gene Anderson, dean of the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration.
“When there’s a decline, and especially in the case of a steep drop like this one, it becomes all the more important to take a steely-eyed look at the underlying reasons and take appropriate action steps,” Mr. Anderson said in the email, sent to the school’s Board of Visitors.
The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago was the top rated business school in the country, followed by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business was the highest ranking local business school, sitting at No. 18. Duquesne University’s Palumbo-Donahue School of Business was unranked within the group of schools at spots No. 135-149. Penn State's Smeal College of Business came in at No. 37.
Reaction to the rankings comes after top law schools such as Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Columbia announced they would no longer submit data to U.S. News for its ranking because of concerns about ethics, equity and mission. At the time the schools claimed that the ranking formula favors those that recruit wealthy students.
Pitt and Penn State’s law schools in February followed suit, with the latter withdrawing both Penn State Dickinson Law and Penn State Law in University Park.
At Pitt, interim dean and law professor Haider Ala Hamoudi said that some parts of the rankings were “inconsistent with Pitt Law’s mission and values, including our longstanding commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.”
He called the ranking system “systematically flawed and harmful to both legal education and the legal profession.”
Following the pushback, U.S. News announced last week that it is delaying the release of its list of top law schools and medical schools as they deal with “an unprecedented number of inquiries” and requests to update data submitted after the collection period.
“The level of interest in our rankings, including from those schools that declined to participate in our survey, has been beyond anything we have experienced in the past,” a statement from the news site reads.
A date for when the list could be released was not given.
But even as the rankings remain under scrutiny, colleges and universities across the country are largely commenting on their place on the recently released list.
An Iowa State University spokesperson on Tuesday acknowledged rankings are imperfect, noting that “the methodologies used by the U.S. News and many other higher education rankings do not fully capture or prioritize many qualities at the core of Iowa State’s mission,” The Gazette reported.
Pitt on its website celebrated ranking increases for its public health, education and engineering programs.
Mr. Anderson, however, in his letter acknowledged that “a change this large is so unusual,” and said the MBA program ranked 54th in BusinessWeek and 41st nationally in the Financial Times.
He suggested the business school’s ranking fell based on U.S. News changing its methodology.
According to Mr. Anderson, U.S. News shifted its focus from reputation items “on which we perform relatively well” to placement items, in which the school does “not compare as well to other programs.”
The weight placed on reputation decreased from 40% to 25% while focus on placement increased from 35% to 50%.
Overall, the school’s peer and recruiter assessment scores ranked in the 40s, while placement statistics for last year’s graduating class ranked 55th. Placement at graduation ranked 66th and placement at three months came in 99th.
“U.S. News hasn’t said why they’ve moved away from their historic emphasis on reputation and given placement outcomes primary in their ranking,” Mr. Anderson said.
Additionally, the number of entering students reporting a domestic undergraduate GPA continued to decrease last fall. That resulted in the school receiving less credit for the average GPA of last year’s entering class, Mr. Anderson said.
As the university looks at the underlying issues for the decrease, Mr. Anderson noted that they are not changing their strategies in response to the rankings but that they “should continually do all that we can to maximize our position in each particular poll while staying within our game.”
“We’re now reviewing immediate actions,” he said, “that are most appropriate in response to this news, as well as considering the longer-term implications of these changes.”
First Published: April 25, 2023, 9:15 p.m.
Updated: April 26, 2023, 4:02 p.m.