For the first time since 2007, administrators at the Tuck School of Business chose not to participate in The Aspen Institute's "Beyond Grey Pinstripes" project an independent ranking of business schools citing the "cost in time and effort" required by the survey, as well as problems with the methodology used to rank schools, Tuck's Assistant Dean for Strategic Initiatives Penny Paquette said in an email to The Dartmouth.
The Aspen Institute judges business schools based on their social and environmental impact using information about their coursework and faculty research, according to Nancy McGaw, deputy director of the Business and Society Program at the Aspen Institute. The survey was released Sept. 21, according to the Aspen Institute's website. In the 2011-2012 rankings, 149 schools from 22 countries submitted data through online survey, according to the website.
"We try to be very transparent and all our methodology is online," McGaw said. "It's very complicated, but we assign three metrics for coursework and one metric for faculty research."
Tuck administrators took issue with the survey's focus on course descriptions and faculty research, as well as the survey's exclusion of extracurricular activities, institutes and centers, and joint degrees and specializations, Paquette said.
"We believe that what students learn outside of the classroom, especially through experiential learning, is as important as what courses they take and the research a school's faculty choose to undertake," Paquette said. "Not including co-curricular activities and the environment in which students learn in the ranking biased the results towards larger schools and implies that learning takes place exclusively in the classroom."
Paquette said the lack of student concern about Tuck's ranking in the survey prompted their decision not to participate.
"We had always felt that being included in the survey, despite our disagreement with their methodology, was worthwhile to reach prospective students with information about our courses and activities in this area," Paquette said. "A survey of our students indicated that very few of them looked to the survey and website for information and that our own communications and website were a better way to reach prospective students."
Tuck administrators encouraged the Aspen Institute to consider activities outside of the classroom in the ranking, according to Paquette.
"I believe that other schools have done the same but the institute believes in its methodology and is not likely to change it," Paquette said. "There will always be enough schools who participate to make it viable."
The Aspen Institute focuses on material learned because it believes this has the greatest impact on ethical understanding, McGaw said.
"What we are really interested in is helping prospective students and faculty see what's happening in classrooms to prepare for ethical stewardship," McGaw said. "We think a lot of rankings in other publications don't give students this information and this is a good way to assess what happens in the classroom. We think it's quite different from other rankings in that regard."
The institute already considers an extremely large amount of information before ranking participating schools, according to McGaw.
"We think that looking at courses and research gives us a very good perspective on what the student experience is," McGaw said. "We receive 6,000 course syllabi and 6,000 research abstracts from participating schools. We look carefully at content and what students are learning for credit."
Despite the Aspen Institute's reasoning for the ranking's particular methodology, Paquette said she does not envision Tuck administrators deciding to participate in the rankings in the future.
"We would certainly re-examine our decision if the survey and its methodology changed or if we found that prospective students viewed the results of the survey as an important source of information about different schools," Paquette said. "We appreciate the work of the Aspen Institute and believe that their efforts over the years have done a lot to raise awareness of the issues of corporate responsibility as it applies to business schools and students."
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business also dropped out of the Aspen Institute's "Beyond Grey Pinstripes" project this year, CNN Money reported Oct. 5. Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business had already elected not to participate in the ranking, making a total of five of the nation's top 10 business schools that have chosen not to participate.
Jim Aisner, director of media relations and senior editor at Harvard Business School, cited concerns about the effectiveness of the survey's methodology as reasons for Harvard's decision not to participate, adding that submitting information to the Aspen Institute is a "time-consuming" process.
"Rather than focusing on the Aspen questionnaire, we are committed to incorporating topics relating to business and society, social impact and environmental sustainability, and finding meaningful methods to evaluate our own progress toward those goals," Aisner said in an email to The Dartmouth.
