The Bloomberg Businessweek 2020-21 Best B-Schools Covid-19 Online-Learning Survey canvassed thousands of MBA students around the world who suddenly found themselves learning online, instead of in physical classes.
We asked them what was working, what should be improved, what should be stopped, and what, if anything, should continue, even after the pandemic is over. We also asked them whether online learning should cost less, schools should shift to more virtual teaching after the pandemic, and if they felt Covid-19 hurt students’ internship and job prospects.
The survey was conducted from May to early August, ordinarily the time of year Bloomberg Businessweek surveys students, alumni, and employers of MBA graduates to produce its annual Best B-Schools full-time MBA ranking.
We decided not to rank MBA programs this year because we felt the results would measure the impact of the pandemic, rather than the quality of a school’s education. The virus hit different places in disparate ways around the world. Reactions from governments, the health-care community, and others varied. We worried that the employment data, survey information on the quality of teaching, networking opportunities, and responses we usually collect wouldn’t be comparable this year. We shifted to focus on this historic moment we all face because of the pandemic.
We invited all schools from our 2019-20 Best B-Schools Ranking to participate, as well as other business schools that met our criteria. Programs can be located anywhere in the world, but classes must be taught primarily in English and they must be for full-time MBA students.
We created the survey in April, soon after many schools had shifted to online teaching. To create relevant, timely questions, we spoke with deans at six schools around the world and interviewed other administrators, analysts, and faculty at an additional 22.
Results were based on 3,532 surveys from first- and second-year students from 95 schools around the world. Participating schools sent surveys on our behalf to all their MBA students, including those about to graduate. Schools had to abide by Bloomberg’s strict code of ethics, which are meant to ensure that all survey respondents take part in our surveys voluntarily, without bias or pressure from school officials or student peers.
Due to the unprecedented pressure on students working from home—struggling to cope with the pandemic and pursue their education at the same time—we didn’t set a minimum number of surveys that needed to be completed from each school. Schools simply had to send the survey to their students once, though many chose to send the survey multiple times to increase the quality of their results. Because there were no survey thresholds, we couldn’t make fair comparisons among individual schools and decided to publish results only in aggregate.
As in past years, we collected MBA Career Services & Employer Alliance (MBA CSEA) employment and compensation data from schools. The employment data, for the Class of 2019, followed standards set by MBA CSEA, a trade group founded in 1994 to establish and collect consistent, comparable, peer-reviewed data.
Every MBA program participating in our survey has its own page highlighting the school-specific employment data we collected. The school pages also include details on the class makeup at each school, including the total number of nationalities in the most recent class and the top five nationalities present.
On each school’s profile page we show whether it follows MBA CSEA employment-data standards and is subject to independent CPA review. Details on the compliance program are here.
For non-U.S.-based schools, salaries submitted in local currencies were converted to U.S. dollars using the average exchange rate for the year ending Aug. 30, 2020.
All participating schools reviewed and confirmed the accuracy of the data they had submitted in late August and early September, several weeks prior to publication.