While defending the validity of her publication’s ranking system, Merritt questioned the schools’ motives for scaling back cooperation with BusinessWeek.

“Wharton liked the rankings and liked participating with BusinessWeek until they weren’t number one any more,” she said.

Wharton dropped from first place in the 2000 survey to number five in 2002.

HBS placed third overall both years. It placed fourth in the student satisfaction category in 2000, and 14th in that category in 2002.

“Students have historically given uneven grades to [HBS],” Merritt said. “Some people might say when you’re getting lower student satisfaction rankings on our survey, it’s beneficial for you not to have your students answer our surveys.”

“Imagine the schools’ line of reasoning applied to the corporate world,” Merritt wrote in a statement on the BusinessWeek website. “It would essentially preclude independent analysts, the media, and other outside parties from assessing the performance of corporations.”

But Lampe wrote in an e-mail that “no other group of organizations provides the media with sweeping access to its ‘customers’ so that the quality of its products and services can be evaluated by journalists.”

A TALE OF TWO SURVEYS

HBS’s decision came just one week after U.S. News & World Report published a ranking that placed the school number one among MBA programs nationwide.

According to Associate Professor of Business Michael D. Watkins, the U.S. News & World Report ranking measures “the strength of schools’ brands,” while BusinessWeek’s strategy of surveying students and alumni is “the only way to measure the quality of the educational experience.

“Schools with strong brands, who are not doing well in terms of student assessments, have obvious incentives to avoid having these assessments made,” Watkins wrote in an e-mail.

But Lampe said that any attempt to link the HBS decision to the school’s lower student rankings from BusinessWeek is “false speculation.”

“That did not cross our minds,” he said.

Lampe, who worked at BusinessWeek in the 1970s before the survey’s existence, said that by denying the magazine access to students, HBS will—if anything—cause its student satisfaction rankings on the magazine’s survey to drop further.

Merritt said officials from other high-ranking schools, including University of Chicago, Northwestern’s Kellogg School and Columbia, have told her they will continue to cooperate fully with her magazine’s survey.