You want to choose the right school for your MBA, so what do you do? you look at the rankings. They tell you just about everything, except how schools are doing on Entrepreneurship. I mean how they are really doing. So I suggest that the Rankers listen up and also start including this in the ranking, and here is why.
Enigma defined
Oxford defines enigma as: “A person or thing that is mysterious or difficult to understand”. An enigma is an absence of something, something missing, an absence of full understanding. In my opinion, the role of entrepreneurship is misunderstood in business school rankings. Right now it seems as though it is not valued at all.
Once I finished my MBA (at IESE Business School) I started receiving the survey for the MBA rankings. These rankings ask you all kinds of stuff, all the way from your studies to what you are doing after. However as a funded entrepreneur I never felt that these surveys were really capturing my profile nor those of other class mates that started businesses.
Rankings don’t list a lot of data on the entrepreneurial endeavors of its students. Forbes for example, lists job categories and has one called “other” but none for entrepreneurs. The Financial Times seems to show the most data on each school. They even list a survey of “aims achieved by taking the MBA”. Under this survey it lists a “started my company” option in their alumni profiles section. This is already helpful if you are looking for an entrepreneurial MBA program, but you need more information to make a good decision. None of the other rankings (Business Week, Economist and Forbes) show any data on entrepreneurial activity at all.
So why should entrepreneurship be part of the rankings?
Entrepreneurship is the engine of the economy. It is about creating jobs instead of destroying them. Successful entrepreneurs are among the most talented and well connected individuals out there. Successful entrepreneurs bring a lot to the Business School in terms of network, skills and even capital. But even more so, more and more aspiring MBAs are interested in creating companies. So they deserve to know which school is best for that.
So it’s important to know if the school has been successful in the past and if it produces entrepreneurs. Because if that’s what you want, then you want to go to the place that is the most “entrepreneur friendly”. Including entrepreneurship in the Business School rankings would also remove an important group of alumni from the “other” categories in the post-MBA jobs and give them a real identity.
Measuring entrepreneurship
Now that we’ve established that a) entrepreneurship is important to know about and b) it’s currently not included in the rankings, how do we rank schools? What could be measured as part of an overall Business School’s ranking position regarding entrepreneurship? Well I am no expert but here are some thoughts:
- % of students that actually start a company during the MBA. This could be backed up by a scan of a legal doc or something: How many of the students actually start companies,
- % of students working full time in their own business 1 year after graduation,
- Capital raised by students: This shows if investors actually feel like the businesses started by students make sense,
- Number of jobs created by student-funded companies,
- Presence of an Angel investor network: Could be by capital invested or number of investments. Again this shows if investors swarm around the school or not,
- Availability of school VC fund: This again shows that the school takes entrepreneurship seriously. It could be measured by the school fund size and number of investments,
- Faculty support to student-entrepreneurs (can students receive credits for entrepreneurial projects?).
So now you know why I think entrepreneurship is the enigma of business school rankings, its relevance is not fully understood by those who make the rankings.
Do you agree that entrepreneurship should be ranked? How would you measure it?
The Entrepreneurship Enigma of Business School rankings http://t.co/LPAqAozVUv
Stephanie van Breen now with the correct link 😉
Sean Ugrin now with the correct link, you were saying?
@PoetsAndQuants @ft @Forbes @BW @TheEconomist when will #MBA #rankings include #entrepreneurship? http://t.co/LPAqAozVUv @iesebs @iesemba
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I am biting my tongue as I write this… outside of a few select b-schools entrepreneurs and business incubation/acceleration of current students goes against the institution’s business model. MBA programs are designed to train middle managers and place them in name brand corporations or firms… to attract more applicants willing the pay the fees to “get a job”. EMBA programs primarily view the sponsoring company or company of employment of the student as the client, the student can almost be an after-thought. The EMBA student is a bridgehead into said company with the goal of selling high-priced programs. Entrepreneurs are not a cash-cow. Then there is the issue of academic accreditation. Professors and the institution exist to hand out degrees and they protect that value at all costs. An entrepreneur is way more practical and looking for tangible business results. These differing expectations create a conflict of culture and ultimately interest. And that leads to the question: do b-schools really build entrepreneurs and their companies ?
What do you do?
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Jurrian Bevelander, I started a company during my MBA where we build project-execution software. The name is Treeveo.
Certain b-schools value the entrepreneurship ranking very highly Jeroen and they invest heavily to create successes. Babson & Leeds come to mind… Successful alumni are very generous with their time and donations creating a virtuous circle and enhancing the reputation of the programs amongst entrepreneurs in the general public. A good program is built around the success of entrepreneurs and company building. If that is what you are looking for, make sure that is what you are getting…
Sean Ugrin I agree a lot with what you say. But the rankings don’t show this info which is very very useful for prospective students. This just makes it harder for candidates to find this out when selecting the school. There are a lot of great entrepreneurs at our school that I’d love to have known about before and that are making amazing contributions to the current student body. One thing has to be kept in min though. Successful entrepreneurs might not be a direct cash cow but they can bring immense value to a school in the mid-long term. Also successful entrepreneurs are required to really put to use all their knowledge because they really have to deal with all the stuff that get thrown at them. So good schools should at least have a few of those around 😉 Thanks for pushing entrepreneurship forward Sean Ugrin
Don’t disagree Jeroen but I have seen it first-hand: short-term revenue drivers trump long-term thinking with regards to building a virtuous circle. A program in my region speaks much more about fundraising and program sales than they do about funding entrepreneurship even though they make a lot of noise about it. It is the old addage: you must water the field before you can harvest ! To be fair, we have to remember that entrepreneurs are outliers, the minority.
Don’t read reviews – speak to alumni and see if they are doing what you want to do !
How about asking entrepreneurs if the culture at the school promote entrepreneurship as much as the literature and pamphlets say it does.
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Cortney Woodruff that’s a really good one. Like I got the credit for Treeveo which is kind of that I guess.