Only the Good Things

It may be the nature of my job, but I am not too happy to see misleading articles reported by newspaper journalists on our local universities.

NTU's Nanyang Business School MBA is ranked 71st by The Economist

vs

NUS' Business School Executive MBA is ranked 11th by The Financial Times

My point is the local media [here, and there] failed to give a balanced, comprehensive report on the surveys that have been conducted by Economist and FT respectively. AS a result, readers have to settle a half-baked and skewed analysis of the business schools in Singapore.

Some points to note:-

• The Economist's survey that ranked NBS 71st in the world, has ranked NUSBS at the 89th position. This piece of information was conveniently left out by the press, which is really strange. Why can't they provide readers a simple comparison of the 2 business schools.

• The Economist assessed 110 MBA programmes, not merely Executive MBAs which we know only cater to approximately 50 students each year. In my humble opinion, the extensive parameters in their methodology is more robust to the EMBA survey conducted by FT.

• The Financial Times assessed only 95 universities that offered Executive MBA, and their survey responses focused on only 4 criteria: salary, salary growth, careers and research.

• The local press did not mention that Chicago Graduate School of Business and Insead are ranked 4th and 5th respectively in the same FT EMBA survey. These colleges have Singapore campuses as well, but are not given the due recognition.

• Besides the EMBA ranking, FT also released a Global MBA ranking. The methodology is more comprehensive and more reflective of the quality of a business school, but was strangely overlooked by the press. If that survey was picked up by the press, the headlines will be very different, because NBS is ranked 24th, more than 10 spots ahead of NUSBS which is ranked 35th.

Interesting results indeed! It just goes to show that mass media can easily influence the public's perception to favour a party's interests.