Creating the 2013 Best Online Business Programs rankings required two steps. Step one was compiling a list of business schools offering master's degree programs online. Step two was collecting data from these schools.
To complete step one, U.S. News & World Report sent statistical questionnaires to 959 regionally accredited institutions that granted a master's degree in business, including public, private, and for-profit institutions. Respondents were asked to identify whether in academic year 2012-2013 they would be offering a master's in business/MBA program through Internet-based distance education courses.
U.S. News defines a distance education program as follows (along the same lines as the U.S. Department of Education'sdefinition):
A program for which all the required coursework for program completion is able to be completed via distance education courses that incorporate Internet-based learning technologies. Distance education courses are courses that deliver instruction to students who are separated from the instructor and support regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor synchronously or asynchronously. Note: Requirements for coming to campus for orientation, testing or academic support services do not exclude a program from being classified as an online master's in business degree program."
U.S. News made repeated attempts to survey institutions and determine whether they meet this new definition. Between the start of data collection in late July 2012 and the fall 2012 closing date, 628 institutions (65 percent) replied. Among them, 213 (34 percent) said they would be offering online master's degree business programs in accordance with the definition, while the rest said they would not.
To complete step two, U.S. News collected additional statistical information from the same questionnaire on the 213 schools with online programs, and this information was scored as outlined in the table below. (Note: All student and faculty statistical data are of July 1, 2011 - June 30, 2012 cohorts, while the remaining data are of policies, services, and technologies in place at the time of the questionnaire completion in the summer and fall of 2012.)
| Student engagement (28% of ranking) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Ranking indicator | Category weight (percent) | Scoring process | |
| Graduation rate | 27 | A school’s graduation rate relative to its program length, divided by the highest rate among all schools. | |
| Best practices | 24 | Up to 1.6 points each for 15 different factors: policies of instructors tracking, reviewing, and providing feedback on student participation; frequencies of instructors tracking, reviewing, and providing feedback on student participation; school tracks students after graduation; collaborative coursework; formal copyright policy; anti-plagiarism policy; American Disabilities Act policy; certified instructional designers; students sign ethics statement; instructor response timeframe; instructor office hours. | |
| Program level accreditation | 20 | AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) accreditation receives full credit; ACBSP (Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs) or IACBE (International Assembly for Collegiate Business Education) accreditation receives half credit. | |
| Class size | 11 | A school’s mean class size and maximum class size, relative to the 20th percentile values among all schools. | |
| One year retention rates | 9 | A school’s mean one year re-enrollment rate of new entrants divided by the highest value among all schools. | |
| Time to degree deadline | 9 | A school that requires students to complete their degree within 1.5 times the program length receives the full score. Other schools score progressively lower the longer their time to degree deadlines. | |
| Admissions selectivity (25% of ranking) | |||
| Ranking indicator | Category weight (percent) | Scoring process | |
| GMAT scores | 30 | A school’s mean GMAT score of new entrants is divided by the largest mean GMAT score among all schools; this is then multiplied by its percent of new entrants who submitted GMAT scores. | |
| GPA scores | 30 | A school’s mean GPA score of new entrants is divided by the largest mean GPA score among all schools; this is then multiplied by its percent of new entrants who submitted GPA scores. | |
| Acceptance rate | 10 | A school’s admitted students divided by applicants, subtracted from 1 to determine a rejection rate; this is then divided by the highest rejection rate among all schools. | |
| Employee sponsorship | 10 | The percentage of new entrants whose tuition was at least partially financed by employers. | |
| Experience | 10 | The extent to which the following are required of new entrants: work experience in business, undergraduate business coursework, and/or undergraduate business degree. A school does not need to require all three to receive the full score. | |
| Letters of recommendation (general) | 5 | Schools with three or more required letters receive the full value; schools that require 2 receive 0.7 value, and those that require 1 receive 0.4 value. | |
| Letters of recommendation (professional) | 5 | Schools with one or more required letters receive full value. | |
| Peer reputation (25% of ranking) | |||
| Ranking indicator | Category weight (percent) | Scoring process | |
| Score | 100 | A school’s weighted mean of scores on a 1-5 scale from marginal to outstanding as submitted by peer institutions, multiplied by 20. | |
| Faculty credentials and training (11% of ranking) | |||
| Ranking indicator | Category weight (percent) | Scoring process | |
| Ph.D. faculty | 40 | Schools employing at least 50 percent of faculty with terminal degrees receive full score; schools with below 50 percent receive a score based on their percents of faculty with terminal degrees multiplied by 2. | |
| Tenured faculty | 20 | Percentage of Ph.D. faculty who are tenured or are tenure-track faculty. | |
| Financed training | 13 | A school receives full score if it supplies or fully finances formal training for new instructors in distance education teaching practices. | |
| Hours of faculty training | 13 | The number of hours a school requires training for instructors to teach distance education courses, divided by the 80th percentile largest value among all schools. All schools with values above the 80th percentile receive the full score. | |
| Continuing faculty education | 7 | School receives full score if it requires continuing formal education on online teaching practices for instructors. | |
| Peer review | 7 | School receives full score if there is a formal system of peer review for instructors. | |
| Student services and technology (11% of ranking) | |||
| Ranking indicator | Category weight (percent) | Scoring process | |
| Student indebtedness | 50 | Half of the weight is a school’s mean student debt at graduation compared with the median such value among other schools; the other half is the percentage of a school’s graduates with debt compared with the median such value among other schools. Only schools with below median debt levels for either were awarded scores. | |
| Technologies accessible to students | 28 | Two points each for the following: PC compliant; Apple compliant; application for tablet computer; application for smartphone; remote access to the following: live streaming audio, live streaming video, recorded audio, recorded video, software-based readers, bulletin boards, simulations, online chat rooms, visual software. | |
| Services available to students | 22 | Two points each for remote access to the following: academic advising, bookstore, 24-7 tech support, financial aid services, digitized library, live librarian, local area network, mentoring, live tutoring, writing workshops, business school-specific career center. | |
Data reporting
Respondents were instructed to provide information at the online degree program level rather than the entire business school level; therefore, questions asking for descriptive statistics on students and faculty—such as enrollment or graduation rates—requested aggregations of data only across schools' online business programs. For profile data that should not be aggregated—such as tuition or application deadlines—schools were given separate instructions.
Schools without rigid barriers between distance and non-distance education students and faculty were asked to make explainable estimates of their distance education populations and report on these cohorts consistently throughout the questionnaire.
Peer assessments
New this year, and a complement to the statistical data from this questionnaire, was a separate peer reputation survey administered for U.S. News by Ipsos Public Affairs, a market research firm. Business school deans and top distance learning higher education academics employed by schools from the 2012U.S. News Top Online Business Programs directory, along with for-profit institutions with some of the largest known online business degree programs, were mailed postcards with links to online surveys.
Each program was sent two surveys. Between August 2012 and October 2012, 20 percent of those surveyed responded by evaluating the academic quality of the other online graduate business degree programs listed on the survey on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (outstanding), or by responding "don't know" to any program with which they were unfamiliar. The two highest and lowest scores for each school were trimmed from the totals before calculating the average peer score among those who rated the program.
A minority of programs received fewer than 10 scores from other schools after this trimming, indicating most of their peers were unfamiliar with them. In such cases, the schools' total scores were divided by 10 instead of the number of schools rating them in order to calculate their average peer scores.
Programs submitting data to U.S. News for the first time in 2012 were not included in the reputation survey. They automatically received the median peer reputation score.
How the rankings were calculated
To compute the Best Online Business Programs rankings, the weighted results of the reputation survey and responses to the statistical questionnaire were linked to different possible achievable point values, which were then summed into overall scores for each eligible school. The highest overall score a school could possibly achieve if it performed strongest in every single ranking indicator was 100.
Numerical rankings were determined by sorting the programs' weighted overall scores in descending order, with the highest scoring school ranked No. 1. No two schools share a rank because although U.S. News rounds overall scores to one decimal place for display purposes on the website, the rankings themselves are based on longer unrounded scores that are all unique.
Schools performing in the bottom 25 percent of overall scores are categorized as Rank Not Published. This means that U.S. News calculated a numerical ranking and score for that school, but decided for editorial reasons not to publish it.
In contrast, 16 schools that either offered an online program for the first time in academic year 2012-2013 or reported fewer than 10 students enrolled were designated as Unranked. This means U.S. News did not calculate a numerical ranking for these schools. All Unranked and Rank Not Published programs, however, are still listed in U.S. News's searchable directory.
Ranking criteria and weights
Here is how different factors were weighted in the rankings.
• Student engagement (weighting: 28 percent): Quality business programs promote participation in classes, allowing students opportunities to readily interact with their instructors and fellow classmates as is practiced with colleagues in professional business settings. In turn, instructors not only are accessible and responsive, but they also are tasked with helping to create an experience rewarding enough for students to stay enrolled and complete their degrees in normal time.
• Admissions selectivity (weighting: 25 percent): Student bodies entering with proven aptitudes, ambitions, and accomplishments can handle the demands of rigorous coursework. Furthermore, online degrees that schools award discriminatively will have greater legitimacy in the job market.
• Peer reputation (weighting: 25 percent): Industry opinion accounts for intangible factors on program quality not captured by statistics. Also, degrees with strong perceptions of quality among academics may be held in higher regard among employers.
• Faculty credentials and training (weighting: 11 percent):Strong online business programs employ instructors with academic credentials one would expect from a campus-based program, and have the resources to train these instructors on how to teach distance learners.
• Student services and technology (weighting: 11 percent): A program that incorporates diverse online learning technologies allows greater flexibility for students to take classes and simulations from a distance. Outside of classes, a strong support structure provides learning assistance, career guidance, and financial aid resources commensurate with quality campus-based programs.
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