FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Students, parents and donors frequently use business school rankings to assess the quality of a program, but many administrators and faculty focus on research productivity as the true measure of a business school. Although rankings and research may seem totally different, University of Arkansas researchers have found that the two measures of program performance are related.

Professors Tom Jensen and Scot Burton and graduate student Jennifer Christie, all from the marketing and transportation department, compared rankings in Business Week and U.S. News with publication in 20 top-rated business journals. Their results were reported recently at the American Marketing Association meeting in Austin, Texas.

According to Burton, there is a struggle between "the emphasis placed on faculty research output and more publicized measures of the quality of business schools. Although the publication productivity associated with research expands knowledge and contributes to the school’s reputation, highly publicized business school rankings have a greater short-term impact on recruiting and relationships with businesses and donors."

The researchers used rankings from U.S. News & World Report for both undergraduate and MBA programs for 1999 and 2000. These were supplemented with Business Week’s 2000 rankings of the top 30 MBA programs. There was a strong correlation between the two rankings, which were based on surveys of business school deans and senior faculty.

"In reviewing the data, we found a degree of convergence between research productivity and rankings, particularly in the undergraduate programs," explained Christie. "While some schools, like the University of Arkansas, were underrated and others were overrated, research productivity and public rankings were definitely related."

Research productivity was measured by a standard method based on the percentage of standardized pages published by faculties for the top 100 schools from 1986 through 1998 in 20 top-rated business journals. Although economics journals were not included, the journals represented six business disciplines: marketing; accounting; management; finance; insurance, international business and real estate; and management information systems.

Discipline-specific research productivity correlated more strongly with rankings at the undergraduate level than in MBA programs. Finance and management showed the strongest and most consistent relationship at both the undergraduate and MBA levels.