Methodology

Beyond Grey Pinstripes is an independent, biennial business school survey and ranking managed by the Aspen Institute's Center for Business Education. Results are published every other year.

Findings from the survey highlight how academic institutions prepare students to meet the business challenges of tomorrow. Beyond Grey Pinstripes is unique—Aspen celebrates coursework, research and activities that prepare MBAs for social, ethical and environmental stewardship. In determining the rankings, Aspen evaluates each school’s course offerings and the research published by its faculty.

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OUTREACH AND ELIGIBILITY
DATA COLLECTION / SURVEY
DATA CLEANING AND VALIDATION
SCORING / RANKING CALCULATIONS

Outreach and Eligibility

At the start of the cycle, the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education (Aspen CBE) sends invitations to nearly 600 business schools around the world which are eligible to participate in the survey and ranking.

U.S. business schools that are accredited by AACSB, EQUIS or AMBA are invited to participate. Schools outside the US with these accreditations are also invited to participate, as are other international schools that are recognized as leading institutions within their country or region.

Schools that meet our eligibility criteria and communicate an interest in participating in the survey are given a personalized username and password that grants their staff access to the Beyond Grey Pinstripes online data collection site.

Aspen CBE staff hold web conferences to help schools prepare to complete the survey and to explain the scoring methodology. Our introductory web conference is available for review by participating schools by contacting aspenbized@aspeninstitute.org.

Throughout the data collection period, support is available to all participating schools via email and telephone.

Data Collection / Survey

Data for the Beyond Grey Pinstripes survey are collected online. The survey has 4 parts:

Data Cleaning and Validation

When the survey site closes, the Aspen CBE team makes an effort to “clean” the data for obvious errors. For example, in certain instances, such as if a rural school reported an MBA student enrollment of 10,000, Aspen CBE staff would contact the school in an attempt to correct this obvious mistake.

Other than obvious errors, staff at Aspen CBE do not attempt to assess the validity of the self-reported data. To support the transparency and accuracy of data reporting we:

1. Require an online signature from the person at each school completing the survey, pledging honesty and accuracy.
2. Make most reported data publicly available online so that peer schools, students, and alumni can review each school’s submission.

Scoring / Ranking Calculations

Coursework and Research data submitted by the schools are scored by teams of Ph.D. Scoring Fellows whose work is overseen by the Aspen CBE project team. These Scoring Fellows are selected in a competitive process from leading institutions around the world.

Scoring Fellows are trained carefully on the scoring protocol. Scoring is done “blindly” (to the extent possible, without school or faculty names associated with data) and in pairs. Scoring Fellows score the courses and research separately and then compare scores with their partners. They must agree on a score or flag the course or research for further review by the Aspen project team.

For each course, the Scoring Fellows must decide first of all whether the course contains content related to social, ethical and/or environmental stewardship. If yes, they must then decide if the course gets additional credit for meeting the “business impact” metric described below.

In the case of research, the Scoring Fellows review article titles and abstracts and decide whether the content relates to social, ethical and/or environmental stewardship.

The scores assigned by the Scoring Fellows are reviewed extensively by the Aspen Institute project team to ensure accuracy.

The calculated and reviewed data are aggregated into four “raw score” metrics for each school, as follows:

1. Availability of Relevant Courses (20%) counts the number of courses offered that the scoring team agrees contain social, environmental or ethical content. This metric answers the question: how much opportunity do students have to take courses with this content?
2. Student Exposure (25%) measures the extent to which students are actually exposed to such content. The formula used in this calculation is the following: [(percent of course time dedicated to such issues) x (course credits / total degree credits) x (# of full-time students enrolled in the course / # of full-time students graduating each year)]. Thus, all things being equal, longer courses, or dedicated courses, or courses with higher enrollments (whether required or simply popular electives) will be worth more in this calculation.
3. Relevant Courses on Business Impact (30%) is a simple count of the number of courses that not only demonstrate their relevance to the survey (see “Availability of Relevant Courses” above), but specifically address the intersection of social and environmental issues in mainstream, for-profit business. In other words, this metric measures how many courses explicitly discuss how for-profit, mainstream business can be a force for improving social and environmental conditions. For example, course content that focuses on the nonprofit sector or on a philosophical approach to ethics would get credit in the “Availability of Relevant Courses” metric, but would not get credit in this metric. However, a course in finance for new ventures, for example, that discusses the organizational practices that are needed “to sustain the lasting health of natural, social and economic systems,” would receive this additional credit. (The quote is from one course description submitted in the last round.)
4. Faculty Research (25%) counts the number of scholarly articles written by business school faculty, published in peer-reviewed, business journals in calendar years 2009 and 2010, that contain social, environmental or ethical content. This metric is designed to indicate the extent to which professors on campus explore these issues in their own research. Scoring Fellows review all article titles and abstracts using similar criteria to the “Availability of Relevant Courses” metric. Then, accepted journal articles are weighted according to its journal quality, as determined by its journal impact factor.

The “raw score” metrics – the outcomes of the four categories above - are adjusted by using a statistical smoothing process called square-root standard deviation about the mean, which produces numerical values that represent how well a school has done relative to the other schools in the survey. Each of these four values, or z-scores, are weighted as indicated above and then summed to arrive at an overall point total. The final ranking is an ordinal list of the top 100 schools, by total points received.