30 Years of Rankings

摘要

Thirty-plus years ago, when Businessweek set out to assess the quality of full-time U.S. MBA programs, getting the hard-copy surveys out the door took some doing. "I literally sat in front of the TV night after night stuffing envelopes," recalls John Byrne, who headed the project. He printed out the surveys using an early-generation Mac and put in a lot of hours licking envelopes and stamps.Byrne, the magazine's management editor at the time, had seen numerous efforts to rate B-schools, but none had tried to measure how satisfied MBA graduates were withthe education and training they'd received. Ultimately, BusinessWeek's top editors were sold on the need to do just that. "Business schools believe in the discipline of the marketplace," says Byrne, founder of PoetsandQuants .com, which covers MBA programs. But there was very little information available on how well they themselves were doing their job. "We thought, Why don't we grade them on pure customer satisfaction?"