How we rank B-schools
The BT-Nielsen study refines the focus on its most important constituent — the customers. Here’s why.
The Rationale
Which B-school should you apply to? And which one should you hire from? People who know the answer to these two questions know the true value of a B-school. This has been the guiding philosophy behind the BT-Nielsen B-school survey methodology right from its inception seven years ago. (BT, though, has been carrying such a ranking since 11 years.) Put another way, our methodology assumes that an institute is only as good as its customers think it to be. Having made this fair assumption, our task then boils down to defining the customers in the most comprehensive manner and reaching out to them in a way that has no bias—intended or unintended.
The Respondents
The five types of B-school customers, or respondent categories for the survey, are:
1. MBA Aspirants
Students or employees planning to take the various MBA entrance tests. The survey team ensured that a mix of students with graduate or postgraduate degrees in professional or general courses was polled. A mix of aspirants with and without work experience was reached out to.
2. Recruiters
Human resource (HR) managers of companies that have been recruiting from B-schools for the past three years were part of this category.
3. Current MBAs
Mostly, but not only, final-year students in reputed B-schools. Having spent a year in their colleges, they know what to expect realistically from a B-school and which college can fulfil what kind of expectations better.
4. Young Executives
Those executives who are MBAs with two or three years of work experience. They bring in the retrospective assessment of B-schools.
5. Functional Heads
Managers with 8-9 years of work experience. These managers interact with B-school graduates more closely, which allows them to assess the quality of education and training imparted in different schools in a much better way. This category also plays a significant role in deciding how many fresh MBAs are hired for their company and from where.
Two Phases of the Survey
As every year, the poll was conducted in two phases.
Phase-I: In this stage, we arrived at a short-list of 30 B-schools. For this only MBA aspirants (666 in number) and recruiters (279) were polled. A total of 945 stakeholders between the two categories were polled. Respondents were asked to name the institutes they were aware of and considered applying to (for HR Recruiters it was customised to “considered hiring from”). Over 60 management institutes were included in what is called the “aided” list at this stage—after a respondent had finished listing the names of the institutes he or she could recall and recommend, the prominent B-schools missing from their recollection were pointed out and their familiarity with those institutes gauged. At the end of this round of poll the master list of 30 most aware and recommended B-schools was prepared.
Phase-II: This phase was designed to rank the 30 short-listed B-schools. All the five categories of respondents were reached out to. The number of respondents in each category was: MBA aspirants 134—57 with work experience and 77 without; recruiters 110; Current MBAs 132; Young Executives 109; Functional Heads 111. Total respondents across all categories: 596. These were spread across 12 cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Lucknow, Delhi and NCR (Noida, Gurgaon and Ghaziabad), Ahmedabad, Pune, Indore, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Coimbatore.
Arriving at scores
To arrive at each institute’s score— or what we call the Brand Equity Index (BEI)—Nielsen’s Winning Brands model was employed. Winning Brands focusses on understanding the key drivers of choice for an institute. Taking into consideration parameters such as favourite school, recommended school and the price premium commanded by a brand, the model calculates the BEI for each of the 30 B-schools. The BEI scores eventually determined the B-school rankings. The higher the BEI score of a B-school, the more attractive it is to MBA aspirants and recruiters.
In order to understand, why a particular B-school ranks higher than others (identifying key drivers of a B-school’s Brand Equity) respondents were asked to rate each of the shortlisted 30 B-schools on eight parameters. To ensure that respondents sreally understood the importance of each parameter, each parameter was divided into sub-parameters (see Classification of Attributes). The Nielsen team that worked on this project comprised Lalitha Priya, Shruti Shroff, Vivek Nauhbar, Shikha Mittal and Vinod Yadav.
