Ethics Playing Roll in B-school Rankings

The Wall Street Journal published its WSJ/Harris Interactive Business School Year 7 Survey yesterday. The survey was based on the opinions and behaviors of 4,430 MBA recruiters who hire full-time business school graduates. Based on the perception of the recruiters, it seems that ethics is playing a big role in determining the ranking of a business school.

Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business has risen to the top of the national ranking pushing University of Michigan's' Ross School from number one to number seven. Why? "When asked which schools' graduates demonstrate strong ethics standards, recruiters named Dartmouth most often, followed closely by Brigham Young," writes the Wall Street Journal. Dartmouth students embodied the values of teamwork, personal integrity, communication skills, and a good work ethic.

Meanwhile, Michigan has fallen several places because, "More Michigan students are demonstrating a, 'what's in it for me attitude' attitude than in the past." Fortunately for society, I guess Gordon Gekko is no longer the roll model. NYU Sloan School students were also praised for being team players and collaborators. Moreover, one of the factors putting the search for talent into overdrive is that younger people want to work for a company with a good image.

Two schools that did well are grappling with difficult issues like ethics in business in their curricula--Yale School of Management and the London Business School, which was profiled recently on its ethics coverage in the Wall Street Journal in an interview with a London Business School scholar. Yale moved from number nine to eight in the national rankings, while London moved from four to three in the international rankings. Yale's slogan is "educating leaders for business and society."

Ethics Case Studies Needed at B-Schools

The Wall Street Journal ran an interview with London Business School senior fellow Craig Smith, who also leads a project with the European Academy of Business in Society to get CSR into mainstream business courses. Smith says the biggest obstacles to getting MBA courses to teach ethics effectively is a lack of case studies, which business schools often use as a main part of their curriculum in general.

"We did an audit and found that about 1,000 cases out there with something on corporate responsibility, but many are not usable because they're dated or because social responsibility is only tangential to the case," Smith said.

Smith also said many professors simply feel reluctant discussing ethical issues because it is out of their "comfort zone," but he recommends professors use discussions to spark debate.

Getting people to think about ethics is what the Carnegie Council is all about. Our program Global Policy Innovations publishes Policy Innovations online magazine, which features innovative solutions to ethical problems in the context of economic globalization. We have a section devoted to these Innovations here. You could call them case studies in global civil society solutions.

Our program has also launched a workshop series that serves as a dialogue between corporations and civil society. At these workshops, participants learn about corporate and civil society approaches to shared ethical problems. Read about and listen to the first iteration with BP, GE, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility here.