Citing a concern for the manner in which magazines collect information to be used in compiling rankings, Harvard Business School will no longer provide news media with alumni contact information.
The University of Pennsylvania’s business school, Wharton, also announced the same decision this past week.
The decision was made public when the two business schools denied the magazine “Business Week” contact information for current students and alumni. The schools will still provide basic facts, such as enrollment numbers.
“Harvard Business School gets hundreds of requests every year from news media, asking for various types of information,” David Lampe, executive director of communication at the Harvard Business School, said. “For many years, we’ve had a policy of not providing this type of information to commercial industries. Now that the magazine industry is more commercial, we felt the process should be the same for the news media.”
University of Wisconsin Business School Dean Michael Knetter said he was surprised to learn that Harvard and Wharton provided alumni contact information to begin with.

Knetter said UW provides “Business Weekly” with graduate students’ e-mail addresses, but UW contacts alumni to see if they would also like to participate.

Lampe and Knetter both agreed that the weight placed upon rankings can be overplayed.
“We don’t endorse rankings, nor do we endorse that it would be possible to come up with a ranking that would take every single factor into consideration,” Knetter said. “Students are different in interests. The issues and factors that every student looks for are different in ranking.”

Lampe said schools were concerned with rankings from the very beginning, and they consider student individual needs to look beyond how high or low a school might rank.

“A wide range of schools offer a wide range of majors and focuses,” Lampe said. “What matters is for the school to match the student.”
Some UW graduate students believe the rankings are taken seriously by students.
UW Ph.D. candidate and marketing teaching assistant Matt O’Hern noted graduate students want to make sure the school they choose will help them achieve their professional and financial goals.
“I got my MBA at Indiana, and my first semester there, our business school’s ranking fell from 15 to 21. Several task forces were set up to try to improve the things that ‘Business Week’ criticized about our school of business,” O’Hern said. “Students realize that when a school’s ranking goes down, top quality recruiters are less likely to come to campus to interview, the job search becomes more difficult and starting salaries can tend to stagnate or even go down.”
Knetter also pointed out that rankings are costly to respond to and are time-consuming.
“Every couple months someone is saying, ‘We need this information from you’ and it’s unfortunate that there really isn’t any standardized way rankings are conducted,” Knetter said.

Knetter, however, said he does not think the use of rankings will go away, as students use third-party information to make business school decisions.
In the latest U.S. News and World Report business school ranking, released April 2, UW ranks 36th among all nationwide business schools and 18th among public business schools.