I believe that the most insignificant product in the recent years, due to the improvements in information access to aspirants, is B-school Rankings.
What came out as an idea to provide the right information ranked on the basis of critical success factors for Univ and b-schools, worked well in an era of print-media revolution. People needed a common platform to see, compare and choose between b-schools or programs and then decide upon joining any one of the available ones that fit their profiles.
With the advent of social media, and in the background of the Buyer2.0 revolution, there is now a situation that a common listing (yeah! that’s what rankings are at times) does not provide any additional information that this generation of buyers/users can’t lay their hands on.
Even the recent perception based surveys too aren’t making any more sense since the perception of the top-100 seem to be almost same (barring 3-4 cases of dropouts, inclusions, etc) for a longer period of time. Since the top-20 to 30 b-schools are the ones that are really the most sought after, and therefore the traffic generators or subscription generators for the rankings, their effective place in the perceptions don’t do much over a medium time frame. So publishing a yearly ranking doesn’t make any sense if the Top-20 or 30 will almost stay the same.
One question could be – what’s the alternative? Well, to me, there need not be any alternative. If the debate that listing colleges don’t help this new gen of buyers and users any more, then how are the rankings doing any better?
I believe that aspirants today have their own “algorithm” to figure out their own rankings. They are not idiots. Each of them would have a customized list of b-schools depending upon a multiple set of factors. If one needs to provide customized rankings, then the mere permutation numbers of all user-customization factors would make this task impossible (coz it may run in hundreds of thousands).
Ranking was a product of pre-Internet days wherein information asymmetry was a major advantage for publishers and therefore this was also a huge money making mechanism. B-schools and Univs also did not have any way then to fix the info asymmetry and therefore pledged their allegiance forever.
But how are you going to make rankings (publishing) obsolete? Can users disallow publishing and stop all publishing houses from releasing their rankings? Hidden inside the alumni and b-schools is a reason that wins over “information asymmetry” – the “Need” to be acknowledged.
It wont be long, however, when the only participants that would participate in reading rankings would be the publishers and the b-schools themselves, with users latching onto other tools and personal algorithms to figure out best b-schools. But till then, everyone is requested to go ahead and practice the caveat emptor policy.