It’s the season of assessments. Yes, final exams, final grades, job offers, acceptances for our students draw near. But it is also a time when what we’ve learned and accomplished during the blur of this past academic year is quantified and summarized. Rankings are typically relied upon to tell us something about our work and worth.

What to do with this feedback from rankings? Receive it, of course, but perhaps not passively. Hear it, consider it, and perhaps use it to respond appropriately with actions. Be open, consider the source, and reflect on the criteria used. Who is it evaluating us, using what covariates, and with what weighting scheme to balance across them? For what purpose is this assessment being made? What is my role as dean in the conversation? Is everyone involved who should be offered a voice actually given one? Evaluations made and shared are, to varying degrees, determinants of next steps taken.

Breaking ranks by adding value

This year, US News and World Report revised its MBA rankings methodology giving placement success and earnings outcomes fully half of the weight. Quality assessment (from peers and recruiters) claimed one-quarter, and student selectivity (inputs like GMAT or GRE scores, average undergrad GPA, acceptance rate) the remaining 25%. In advance, each school is evaluated on eight factors, and those scores are de-standardized to adjust for means and deviations, and are then rescaled. “The top school received 100; others received their percentage of the top score. Finally, each business school was numerically ranked in descending order of its overall score,” as reported to us by Robert Morse, Eric Brooks, Kenneth Hines, and Sam Wellington.

Poets&Quants had something to say about this pivot. P&Q refer to the US News and World Report 2023 rankings as “topsy-turvy.” Particularly interesting is P&Q’s robust critique of how the shifting of GPA measurements to a mode based on our North American-style four-point grading system effectively leaves out great sections of the education world.

These exchanges are just a part of an important debate taking place among business schools about rankings. If we are to believe in rankings systems – and, for the record, I do believe in them – then we must also believe in the qualities being ranked. If we profess to believe, for example, in environmental and social justice as responsible outcomes of our graduates as future business leaders, but then market ourselves on the basis of a ranking that focuses so much on our graduates’ salaries, could we be missing great swaths of the potential that our work can and does have?

Our college held steady with an overall rank of 15 in the US News rankings. For sub-specialties like Management, we ranked #8, for Real Estate, #5. This feedback is encouraging. We work hard. We accept this as a certain measure of progress, and with clear eyes and intention.

During January, I devoured Colin Diver’s excellent book, Breaking Ranks: How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do about It. It is a fascinating treatise on the pernicious and destabilizing influence of higher education rankings by the US News and World Report. The book is a privileged lens; Diver, the former president of Reed College and former dean of Penn Law School, has seen this up close. He has sat in a similar seat to where I am now. And he fully understands the layered commitments in this position. While some deans might like to bow out of what many call the “beauty contest,” others worry about leaving out the potential good we, as deans, faculty, and staff, all have to offer from years of hard work, expertise, perspective, and dedication.

Our college continues to benefit from these robust rankings. But I take the approval with a bit of a salty eye toward potential improvements in rankings methods and what they measure. What do I mean? Consider that one of the goals of the business school historically has been to better the lives of its students. Indeed, one in five students at U.S. universities seek benefit from the education they receive in business schools. Those students, their families, and sometimes the communities they represent, look to the educational opportunities that are presented to advance. I was gratified to work on this priority with Ann Harrison, dean of Berkeley’s Haas Business School, and Geoffrey Garrett, dean of the USC Marshall School of Business. Our Financial Times Op-Ed from last month reflects our shared commitment to new rankings that emphasize covariates and metrics that reflect what we actually do at business schools, and that do so in a way prioritizing transparency in measurement and in weightings schemes.

Read here: Business school rankings must measure the ‘societal value added’. Your thoughts are always welcome.

A call to action that comes with the leverage to lean on the system and to improve its service to the greater good.

While we are pleased to have received such approval in recent ranking polls (Berkeley Haas sits at #11 in USNWR, USC Marshall tied us at #15), schools like ours benefit from this system because we’re foundational, because we speak the language, because we work hard. But no matter how successful one ever is, the victory is empty if the benefit isn’t shared. We intend to continue using our position of strength to call on our fellow deans in business schools to join a coalition of the willing, to join with us to lean on the existing rankings system (not to abandon it), in order to improve its service to the greater good.

Evaluating ourselves is not easy.

Of course, it’s important to read the data carefully in any evaluation exercise. Several of our faculty colleagues have done some joltingly good work on the way we humans evaluate ourselves and each other. See the upcoming 2022 Research With Impact report for a trifecta of features on the work by Jacqueline Rifkin on the perception of threatening groups as pervasive in Psychological Science, research by Ya-Ru Chen and Angus Hildreth in Organization Science on how low performance causes people to make self-interested lies, and by Collin Raymond, a lead article in the American Economic Review, on how “motivated beliefs” can cause “rosy recall,” people hearing only the positive feedback they receive, and not the calls to change. Well done, dear colleagues! These findings surely cause us pause in how we might think about rankings and what actions we can and do take.

How might we put this into a usable context? In a conference call of deans that are part of the CEMS Global Alliance in Management Education just last week, Enrico Vita, CEO of Amplifon, was asked to define a responsible leader. He answered simply: “A responsible leader has a set of very few very simple very strong basic values: integrity, transparency, fairness, also a strong ethical conduct in general. The responsible leader thinks about the impact on all the stakeholders, but puts the interest of the collective above all, always takes full ownership and responsibility of their actions, creates a work environment that’s inclusive and is diversified, where failure is defined as not helping or not asking for help.” Responsibility, transparency and taking ownership, indeed!

I have traveled once around the globe this last month. I loved engaging with our Cornell alumni who were so happy to gather in person after so many years apart. I also loved re-engaging with several Cornell partner institutions. What I can tell you is that I have witnessed incredible work in higher education for the benefit of students, business, society, and planet. I say let’s keep giving and receiving feedback, and let’s keep making a positive difference.

And I cannot leave without mentioning:

• Mark Nelson’s term as dean coming to an end June 30. Mark has led Johnson since 2016 with a calm fortitude, humor, and serious dedication, and he’ll bring all of that into the classroom again this fall. Not an end, just the next stretch of road. We celebrated his many accomplishments at the Johnson School’s Big Red Bash and the School’s Advisory Council meetings that followed. Let’s do take this time to thank and herald him and to cheer on his future endeavors.

• It’s an important moment for our faculty and staff. This week I announced key awards received by Jawad Addoum, Pedro Perez, Emily Garbinsky, Chris Gaulke, Ravi Kanbur, Lawrence Jin, Michelle Duguid, Harry de Gorter, and Vicki Bogan were recognized for their teaching, significant early career research awards, practice innovation, excellence in their service to national and global organizations. Additionally, six senior staffers earned new academic credentials, from certificates to Master’s degrees. We are so proud!

• As the services industry continues to dominate global GDP, value added and employment, we at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business are working hard to retool a segment of our expertise through a newly-launched Services Management area group. We aspire for this new disciplinary area to offer new research opportunities for incumbent faculty already specializing in this field to amplify with new hires, and to render opportunities to students in keeping with our mission to pursue sustainable, shared prosperity in a growing, changing business world. We launch the new group on July 1.