Gratitudes and latitudes in M.B.A. attitudes: Customer orientation and theBusiness Week poll

A re-examination of the data on customer satisfaction with business schools reported byBusiness Week addresses questions concerning the manner in which student evaluations and recruiter assessment are weighted to determine results for the graduate and corporate polls, as well as how the latter two scores are combined to obtain the overall ranking. Further, as a measure of student satisfaction, the graduate poll holds considerable interest in its own right. Accordingly, an explanatory model based on various objective and quasi-objective measures is developed to account for the student evaluations. It is argued that — after taking account of the available predictors — the errors in this model (unexplained variance or residual terms) represent graduate gratitudes bestowed upon the various schools. It appears that these measures of student appreciation vary with certain geographical characteristics. In other words, the gratitudes expressed in MBA attitudes depend in part on variations in geographic populations, longitudes, and latitudes.The author thanks George Day, Don Lehmann, David Reibstein, and Alex Simonson for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. He also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Columbia Business School's Faculty Research Fund.