MBA rankings are integral to the management education world because they address the needs of three sets of stakeholders: Faculty, alumni and students look at rankings to evaluate how their school fares with respect to others; employers peruse rankings to gauge alternative hiring sources; and MBA aspirants trust rankings to help them shortlist schools to apply to and choose from. Whether you like them or loathe them, you can’t ignore rankings.

There are many who criticise the concept of MBA rankings. The criticism has centered on the methodologies used to rank the schools and that many rankings measure things that are easy to quantify (like the cut-off score for GMAT or CAT, or the number of international students etc).

The over-reliance of rankings on self-reported data and the absence, in most cases, of validation and authentication of that data has been questioned several times in the past.

This is the reason why NHRDN and People Matters came together to build a robust methodology and execute a fully validated and authenticated scoring and ranking of business schools in India. This is the first ranking being done by the community of HR professionals, the very people who are the market for B-school education and graduates, the consumer if you will. As a consumer, one always aims to have accurate, legitimate and reliable information to take decisions that are most appropriate for our business context.

The USP of the NHRDN-People Matters B-school Rankings is its methodology. In a vast exercise spanning months, involving leaders from academia and industry, the data solicited from the B-schools was validated through onsite visits and interactions with the faculty and students and was then evaluated on parameters like academic excellence, industry-academy interface and performance of the alumni. B-school applicants and hiring managers will definitely appreciate the function-wise ranking of schools that clearly spell out the academic strengths of the various institutions.

The beneficiaries of this ranking are many, and for different reasons: B-schools benefit from an unbiased benchmarking exercise that helps them reflect and improve; the community at large benefits from access to validated information; and for students and employers, while there is no such thing as ‘best’ in the business school world, at least now they have the information to assess what could be ‘best’ for them respectively. Keep sending us your encouraging words and your constructive opinions, it helps us improve and be more relevant to our community.

Happy reading,

Esther Martinez Hernandez
Editor-in-Chief