McCombs今年在FT Ranks上的排名下降，其MBA院长就特别给学生写的公开信，对于FT Ranking的影响因素做了很详细的解释。有参考意义！McCombs是UT Austin的MBA学院，其MBA教育在美国一直排名20左右。
Letter from Dean
Dear MBA Students:
Like you, I was not pleased with the recent Financial Times ranking which dropped McCombs to No. 35 among U.S. MBA programs and No. 57 worldwide. While I'm not happy with the ranking, it does have some lessons for us, which I'd like to outline here along with some of the related areas where our school has been pursuing improvements. At the same time, I believe we should not read too much into this one ranking, for reasons I'd also like to share.
The FT ranking is based 55% on alumni career progress, 35% on the international and gender composition of students, faculty, and advisors, and 20% on research metrics. A school's international and research numbers do not change radically from year to year, so movement in this ranking typically relates to alumni career progress. The FT measures this by surveying graduates three years out and averaging the results from the previous two surveys. As a result, the 2005 ranking largely hinges on alumni career progress from the classes of 1999, 2000, and 2001.
Statistically, the main driver of our drop this year is that alumni from 1999-2001 appear not to have enjoyed strong salary progress relative to some of their peers. Interestingly, these alumni were happy with the program and gave us a high "alumni recommend" rank. They are also earning respectable salaries today, ranking No. 21 in the country on this metric. But they rank poorly in terms of progess, which the FT measures against the salaries students were earning before they went to business school. The progress metric is the main one that brought our ranking down. At many schools that beat us on this metric, the graduates earn less today than their McCombs counterparts, but they progressed more relative to where they started from, which gave their schools more points on the survey.
If you look closely at the LACE w:st="on">U.S.LACE> schools in this year's ranking, you will find a group of about a dozen schools that are ranked above us even though their graduates earned less than ours in 2001 and earn less today. Graduates of most of these schools also earned less than our graduates in 2004. Their alumni also recommend this same set of programs less highly than ours.
I have confidence that some of the things the school has been working hard on since 2003 will register improvements on salary progress in future surveys. These improvements include
* Interviewing admitted candidates, which helps us match career goals with the strengths of the school.
* Strengthening MBA career services and integrating them with admissions and alumni relations.
* Improving the alignment of our faculty and class resources with industry and the corporate employment market.
* Bolstering consulting-related courses in the curriculum and strengthening ties to consulting firms.
* Bolstering our finance offerings and finance-industry relationships (many of the strong finance schools do well on the progress metric).
* Bolstering our marketing offerings, including course offerings, practica, and other opportunities for student-industry interaction.
* Continuing, through input from students and industry, to refine all aspects of our curriculum to keep it relevant and professionally enriching.
* Continuing to emphasize leadership abilities and the managerial skills that relate strongly to the capacity for managers to move within an organization.
As always, stop me in the halls or come by my open office hours if you have more questions, and I look forward to seeing many of you over the course of another great semester at McCombs.
George W. Gau
Dean
[此贴子已经被作者于2005-8-5 0:50:04编辑过] | 
