There are four separate numerical indicator rankings for online master's of business degree programs: admissions selectivity rankings, faculty credentials and training rankings, student engagement and accreditation rankings, and student services and technology rankings. To make U.S. News's honor roll of top online graduate business programs, a school needed to place in the top third of ranked schools (rounded) in at least three of these four modules.
[See all methodologies for U.S. News's rankings of top online education programs.]
Data collection commenced on July 28, 2011, using a password protected online system. On that day, U.S.News & World Report E-mailed surveys to all 960 regionally accredited institutions it determined had granted master's degrees in business in 2010, using U.S. Department of Education's data as a source.
Respondents were asked at the beginning whether they offered master's degree in business programs with course content at least 80 percent accessible to students online. (This threshold is in keeping with The Sloan Consortium's industry standard definition of what constitutes an online course.) Those selecting "yes" were then requested to report in depth statistical information that U.S. News used to compute rankings and build profile pages in its searchable directory of online business degree programs.
U.S. News made repeated attempts to get institutions to participate in data collection and then requested that respondents verify their data. By the survey's closing date (Oct. 28, 2011), 616 institutions (64 percent) responded to the survey. Among those, 177 reported offering online master's degree in business programs while the rest said they did not.
Thirteen schools that reported offering programs said that 2011 was their first year doing so; therefore, U.S. News did not include these new programs in any of the online business degree rankings because of their inabilities to supply a full academic year's worth of data. Their information is included in the online directory of searchable program profiles.
The survey instructed business school survey respondents to report information at the program level rather than the school level. As a result, questions asking for descriptive statistics on students and faculty—such as enrollment or numbers of course offerings—requested aggregations of data across all of a school's online business programs.
In contrast, questions not asking for profile data—such as tuition or career center offerings—could not be aggregated, and schools were asked to report what was most 'typical' given the breadth of their programs. Some data provided by schools with multiple online business programs are consequently representative of the typical program at the school rather than being fully applicable to each distinct one.
For all student and faculty data, the survey asked schools to incorporate in their calculations to the best of their abilities only students and faculty who were engaged in online accessible courses applicable toward online accessible business degrees. In cases when schools offered both fully integrated online and face-to-face business programs in which no distinctions between online students/faculty and face-to-face students/faculty were made by the schools, respondents were encouraged to provide data on online students/faculty based on informed estimates. Most important was that the standards used for reporting online students and faculty in these blended programs were consistent.
Once the survey deadline passed, U.S. News analyzed the quantity and quality of data collected to determine which questions could be used for rankings. Some questions garnered response rates too low to be used. Other questions received data that appeared unreliable for various reasons. Therefore, rather than producing an overall ranking based on incomplete and sometimes inconsistently reported information, U.S. News decided this year to instead produce four distinct master's in business degree rankings comprised only from select questions that significant percentages of schools answered.
Corrected on 1/10/12: An earlier version of this article did not correctly define an online business degree indicator relating to faculty experience.
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