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Journal of Education for Business

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Gratitude in Graduate MBA Attitudes: ReExamining the Business Week Poll
Morris B. Holbrook
To cite this article: Morris B. Holbrook (2004) Gratitude in Graduate MBA Attitudes: ReExamining the Business Week Poll, Journal of Education for Business, 80:1, 25-28, DOI:
10.3200/JOEB.80.1.25-28
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Published online: 07 Aug 2010.

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Date: 12 January 2016, At: 22:23

Downloaded by [Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji] at 22:23 12 January 2016

Gratitude in Graduate MBA
Attitudes: Re-Examining
the Business Week Poll
MORRIS B. HOLBROOK
Columbia University
New York, New York

T

he last 50 years surely will go
down in the annals of business
education as the era in which strategic
thinking embraced the concept of customer orientation (Drucker, 1954;

Levitt, 1960) and pushed this conventional wisdom into enterprises in all
walks of life, including not only forprofit ventures but also such disparate
areas as medicine, religion, politics,
and, inevitably, education itself (Fulton,
1994; Keat, Whiteley, & Abercrombie,
1994). Education in the service of customer orientation has suggested the
merits of offering students information
that they find easy and fun to assimilate
(“edutainment”), collecting feedback
for the purpose of guiding teachers
toward the creation of more popular
course offerings (student evaluations),
and designing programs intended to
enhance the careers of graduates by fostering their success on the job market
(vocationalism or, less politely, the
“trade-school mentality”). Often, such
academic compromises occur in ways
that have prompted shocked outcries
from those (beginning with Veblen,
1918) committed to the advancement of

higher learning in America (Aronowitz,
2000; Bok, 2003; Crainer & Dearlove,
1999; Edmundson, 1997; Holbrook,
1998; Holbrook & Day, 1994; Readings, 1996; Rotfeld, 2001; Sacks, 1996;
Shumar, 1997; Zimmerman, 2001).

ABSTRACT. As the strategic commitment to customer orientation has
penetrated all aspects of corporate life,
including business education, various
publications (e.g., Business Week)
increasingly have been conducting
polls that rank schools on criteria that
include evaluations by their former
students. These student evaluations
reflect certain objective characteristics
of the schools as well as a remaining
positive or negative residual that may
be attributed to gratitude or ingratitude. In this study, the author investigated how business schools would be
ranked in such polls if graduates’
assessments reflected the schools’

objective characteristics free from the
biases of gratitude or ingratitude.
Results show that some schools’ rankings would drop precipitously, whereas others’ rankings would rise.

Nowhere has the ethos of customer
orientation been more insistent or more
frequently criticized (“Ranking business
schools . . .” 2002; Schatz, 1993) than in
the periodic polls claiming to identify
the “best schools” in general and the
“top” business schools in particular.
Consider, for example, the surveys compiled and reported every couple of years
by such publications as Forbes (Badenhausen & Kump, 2003), U.S. News &
World Report (USN&WR) (Morse &
Flanigan, 2003), and, most conspicuously, Business Week (Merritt, 2002).
These magazines differ somewhat in the
aspects of business school (B-school)

excellence most strongly emphasized.
Forbes focuses primarily on careerrelated considerations regarding postMBA salaries and other compensation.

USN&WR includes an assessment of
academic excellence. Business Week
(BW) touts a customer orientation based
on the concerns of corporate recruiters
and on evaluations by recent MBA
graduates.
Because these rankings are read universally, publicized vociferously, and
regarded widely with an exaggerated
degree of credulity, deans and other
business-school administrators do what
they can to achieve favorable showings
in the various polls. The much-debated
and often-discredited systems of student evaluations (Sproule, 2000) provide just one example of the hoops
through which accommodating school
administrations willingly jump to cater
to students’ whims and wishes. Thus, in
many or even most B-schools, customer
orientation and customer-relationship
management—or just plain pandering
to the students—has become a mantra

rivaled only by that dedicated to maximizing shareholder wealth.
Looking at the consequences of customer orientation from a somewhat different angle, one might ask what rewards
a school gains by bending over backwards to cater to its student-customers’
desires. This question raises the issue of
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how much students appreciate having
their career needs and vocational wants
met at every turn. In short, it raises the
issue of gratitude.
Holbrook (1993) proposed a measure
of MBA gratitude, as reflected by the
Business Week (BW) poll. Specifically,
the poll collects data from corporate
recruiters and from recent MBA graduates and combines these into an overall
ranking. BW also reports scores for each

school on a variety of other objective
and quasi-objective measures. The
approach proposed by Holbrook uses all
available objective and quasi-objective
data from sources other than the MBAs
themselves to explain the graduate evaluations and then treats the residuals or
error terms as an index of student gratitude. In other words, those graduates
who like their schools better than any
objective measures would display gratefulness. Those who give ratings below
the levels justified by available predictors show ingratitude. Operationally,
this approach regresses results for the
graduate poll on all available objective
and quasi-objective predictors, computes residual error scores, and regards
these residuals as indicators of gratitude
(positive errors) or ingratitude (negative
errors).
Holbrook (1993) estimated that the
most ungrateful business school graduates came from Wharton, Columbia,
Michigan, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT), and the University of California at Los Angeles

(UCLA), in that order. We might wonder, first, what we would find if we
reapplied his method to the results of
the Business Week poll conducted a
decade after the original study by Holbrook and reported by Merritt (2002).
Toward that end, in the present
research I regressed the 2002 graduatepoll results for the top 30 business
schools on 17 objective and quasiobjective variables provided by BW.
These variables included the following
predictors:
• Evaluations by corporate recruiters
• An assessment of intellectual capital
• Annual tuition
• Applicant acceptance rate
• Enrollments of female, international,
and minority students
26

Journal of Education for Business

• Pre- and post-MBA pay

• Percentage of students with job
offers at graduation
• Average work experience prior to
the MBA
• Recruiter ratings of students on
ethics, teamwork, and analytic skills
The analysis also included three measures of MBA “worth” along the lines
suggested by Hindo (2002):
• Percentage increase in compensation = post-MBA pay/pre-MBA pay
• Return on investment = (post-MBA
pay – pre-MBA pay)/tuition
• Years to payback = [(2 × tuition) +
(1.5 × pre-MBA pay)]/(post-MBA pay
– pre-MBA pay)
In a stepwise regression of the
graduate-poll results on these 17 objective and quasi-objective variables, the
only predictor that emerged as statistically significant, explaining half the
variance in student evaluations, was
post-MBA pay (r = .70, r2 = .49, p <
.001). However, my aim in the present

study was not just to find the significant
predictors of graduate ratings. Rather, I
sought to explain as much of the variance in the graduate poll as possible so
as to obtain a residual measure of
(in)gratitude. Toward this end, forcing
all 17 predictors into the equation produced an overall explained variance of
R2 = .725. Though not statistically sig-

nificant (because of the few degrees of
freedom remaining when using 17 variables to predict the scores for 30
schools), this relationship used objective and quasi-objective characteristics
to explain close to three quarters of the
variance in the graduate-poll results.
As already noted, the residual error
terms in the predictions described above
provided assessments of gratitude or
ingratitude among the graduates of each
school. For the 2002 BW data, I show
these residuals-based (in)gratitude
scores in Table 1.

It appears that several schools with
high levels of ingratitude happen to be
located in large eastern metropolises:
Columbia (New York), MIT (Boston),
Wharton (Philadelphia), Carnegie
(Pittsburgh), Georgetown (Washington),
Harvard (Boston), and NYU (New
York). We might surmise that there
exists something of a tough, eastern bigcity “attitude” that inspires the graduates of these schools to show low levels
of appreciation for their MBA experiences. Indeed, if we represent the
schools on that list by a zero–one
dummy variable and correlate this
dummy variable with our measure of
gratitude, the relationship is moderately
strong and statistically significant (r =
–.54, r2 = .29, p < .005).
One hardly can fail to notice that,
despite their efforts to pursue customer
orientation in any and every possible

TABLE 1. Residuals-Based Ingratitude/Gratitude Scores for the 30
Schools in the 2002 Business Week Data

School

Ungrateful students
Ingratitude score

Columbia
Notre Dame
MIT
Purdue
Wharton
Carnegie
Texas
Georgetown
Indiana
Berkeley
Harvard
Emory
Michigan
NYU
Vanderbilt

–2.42
–1.18
–1.17
–1.03
–.89
–.83
–.76
–.72
–.63
–.58
–.53
–.48
–.46
–.20
–.13

Grateful students
School
Gratitude score
Chicago
Northwestern
Cornell
Yale
UCLA
Michigan State
Washington
Maryland
Stanford
UNC
Dartmouth
USC
Duke
Rochester
Virginia

1.95
1.79
1.66
1.22
1.05
.95
.82
.78
.59
.47
.33
.14
.13
.09
.05

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way, some schools such as Columbia
suffer rather spectacularly from what
appears to be an elevated level of student ingratitude. Therefore, one might
wonder how this difficulty might affect
a school’s standing in the overall Business Week rankings. To address this
question, I began by deriving the
weights needed to explain BW’s overall
ranking by means of the three scores
that the magazine uses to derive its
global assessment—namely, the corporate poll (recruiter assessments), the
graduate poll (student evaluations), and
intellectual capital (a measure based on
faculty publications and other kinds of
notoriety). Regressing standardized
overall rank on standardized scores for
these three predictors produced weight
coefficients of .617 for the corporate
poll, .375 for the graduate poll, and .148
for intellectual capital, with an overall R
of .98 (R2 = .96, p < .001). In this case,
the weight for recruiter assessments was
over one and a half times as large as that
for student evaluations, despite BW’s
claim to weight the two equally. An
obscure passage from Merritt (2002)
can serve to explain this imbalance:
“Because there tend to be greater differences among schools in the corporate
survey, recruiter opinion can have a
greater impact on the overall ranking”
(p. 88).
I then applied those weights to the
standardized scores for the corporate
poll, the predicted graduate poll, and
intellectual capital, with the predicted
student evaluations (based on the 17
aforementioned objective and quasi-

objective variables) substituted for those
actually given by the graduates surveyed.
In other words, I removed the effects of
student (in)gratitude to estimate what the
overall scores would have been had the
graduate poll reflected objectively measurable aspects of each school, free from
grateful or ungrateful biases for or
against one’s own alma mater.
According to this approach, the actual
and expected overall B-school rankings
showed a strong statistical correlation of
r = .96 (r2 = .92, p < .001; Spearman r =
.95). Nevertheless, some of the expected
rankings of schools (based on predicted
student evaluations with the effects of
gratitude and ingratitude removed) differed considerably from the actual rankings reported by BW (compiled in a way
that allows gratitude and ingratitude to
exert its biasing effect). In Table 2, I
show the actual and expected rankings
of the “best” business schools included
in the top 10 by BW for 2002.
I found that several schools (Harvard,
Stanford, MIT, Michigan, Duke, and
Dartmouth) did not change much in
their rankings as the result of student
gratitude or ingratitude. However, it
appears that the top two schools benefit
enormously from the gratitude shown
by their graduates. Thus, Northwestern
and Chicago would fall from 1st and
2nd places to 6th and 11th, respectively,
if the biases resulting from student gratitude were removed. Conversely, a couple of schools suffer from what appears
to be a bad attitude or lack of appreciation evinced by their former students.
Specifically, were it not for ingratitude,

TABLE 2. Actual and Expected Ranks of Schools Ranked in the Top 10
by the 2002 Business Week Poll
School

Actual rank

Expected ranka

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

6
11
3
5
2
4
1
8
7
9

Northwestern
Chicago
Harvard
Stanford
Wharton
MIT
Columbia
Michigan
Duke
Dartmouth
a

Based on expected rankings of 30 schools.

5th-place Wharton would rank 2nd.
And, if its graduates were unbiased by
extreme ingratitude toward their alma
mater, Columbia would climb from 7th
to 1st place in the rankings.
One might reasonably ask what all this
means in terms of marketing strategy to
an administrator such as a dean faced
with the responsibility of managing a
school’s public image. Ironically, it
appears that customer orientation does
not suffice to produce high levels of student gratitude and thereby fails to ensure
a favorable ranking in the BW poll.
Rather, gratitude seems to stem from
some sort of cultural biases that appear to
differ from one locale to another. Consequently, to the extent that the BW rankings matter to a school’s fortunes (as they
so obviously do in today’s customeroriented and careerist climate), an academic administration might be welladvised to adjust its admissions process
in ways intended to attract and accept
students predisposed toward appreciative
and grateful responses.
Such a proposed strategy raises the
question of how a school might find and
select those candidates characterized by
habitual tendencies toward appreciation
and gratitude. One workable approach
might be to include a question or set of
questions on the admissions form to
inquire about the excellence of the
applicant’s prior educational and work
experiences. Candidates who gave low
scores to their former colleges or downgraded their previous jobs might be
eliminated from further consideration
on the grounds that they probably will
do exactly the same thing to their graduate business schools when contacted by
Business Week at the end of their MBA
programs. To paraphrase the old saying,
the best predictor of future (in)gratitude
may well be past (in)gratitude.
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