How reliable are published rankings?
Each year U.S. News and World Report magazine publishes a ranking of top business schools based upon a survey that it conducts. And Business Week has created a book entitled The Best Business Schools. Those are useful guides so long as you don’t put too much emphasis on small differences in rankings. That is, if a ranking puts Northwestern first, Harvard second, Chicago third, Pennsylvania fourth, and Dartmouth fifth, there is good reason to believe that those are top business schools, but not that they necessarily stack up against each other in exactly that order. A better use of a ranking is to think in terms of clusters of schools. The top eight or nine schools are the super-elite; the next eight or nine are the elite; and so on.
