The Amos Tuck School of Business Administration has finished near the top of yet another set of business school rankings, due largely to high marks from corporate recruiters who praised the workplace abilities of the school's graduates. The Wall Street Journal rankings placed Tuck third overall, a slight decline from recent years.
The Tuck School placed second last year and first in 2001.
This year's rankings placed equal weight on three criteria: perception, mass appeal and supportive behavior. Past years had placed more emphasis on recruiters' perceptions of the school and its students, a category in which the Tuck School had traditionally excelled.
The perception criterion factors in 20 different categories, including leadership potential, teamwork skills and interpersonal quality. The school's recent drop in the rankings reflects the decreased emphasis on such factors rather than a slide in the quality of Tuck's faculty or student body, said Tuck School spokeswoman Kim Keating.
The Tuck School's relatively small student body also hurts its scores in two other areas. Mass appeal measures the number of corporate recruiters each school lures and supportive behavior measures recruiters' plans to return to schools again. With fewer students than its competitors, the Tuck School cannot attract as many recruiters.
There are six major national business school rankings: The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Business Week, The Economist Magazine's Intelligence Unit, Financial Times and Forbes Magazine. Tuck ranks in the top 10 in all of the rankings.
Keating called the rankings valuable, but noted that they all measure different things and are most telling when looked at together. The Tuck School tends to do very well in rankings that study student attributes, such as The Wall Street Journal, and not as well in those studies that put more emphasis on the size of the institution. The Financial Times rankings, for example, take the business school's Ph.D. program into account. Tuck has no Ph.D. program, and ranked eighth on the paper's list.
But Keating said the school's small size has other benefits beyond the rankings.
"We don't have a [Ph.D.] program purposely," she said. "We think that that is an advantage."
Meanwhile, the school takes pride in knowing corporate recruiters are happier with Tuck graduates than they are with graduates of any other business school.
