<p>Obviously there is no ‘perfect’ parameter. Every ranking has inherent flaws.</p>
<p>Ideally, rankings should be used as just one piece of information to determine where you should go. Everybody should create their own individual “mental ranking” that weights the things that are important to them. For example, for those students who are sure they want to be entrepreneurs, then Babson becomes an extremely prominent choice. For those whose passion is Operations Management, then Sloan becomes the clear top choice (and in fact, LFM becomes by far the best fit). </p>
<p>But good rankings are useful in the sense that they can provide you with some useful information to frame your decisions. For example, people who don’t know anything about B-schools would probably not know that Northwestern Kellogg is a huge marketing powerhouse. </p>
<p>The reason why I believe USNews is the best ranking is simple - it tends to produce results that are the most reasonable. While one might say that this is simply an example of circular logic, the fact is, we ought to discount rankings that produce wild and weird results. I think we all have an instinctive feel that certain schools like HBS, Wharton, and Stanford are among the handful of very top schools. Hence, a ranking like WSJ that would purport to rank Stanford #44 in one year loses tremendous credibility. In general, the M7 schools (HBS, Wharton, Stanford, Sloan, Kellogg, Chicago, and Columbia) will remain the dominant 7 schools for a long time in terms of popular consciousness and recruiter desirability.</p>