Survey Rates B-School Fourth; Students Hear Dean's Defense

Lawrence E. Fouraker, dean of the Harvard Business School, yesterday told a group of 200 concerned students not to worry about a recent magazine survey that ranks Harvard fourth in academic quality among the nation's graduate business schools.

"You'll have no problem getting jobs--outside of Harvard you're thought of as super-people," Fouraker told the students, many of whom attended the unpublicized meeting on less than an hour's notice.

Fouraker agreed to the open meeting after receiving a letter signed by over 100 business school students, asking him to hold a meeting to discuss the survey rating.

Worried

The students were concerned about the possible effect of the survey on employers, as well as about the actual quality of the business school teaching, according to Robert M. Haft, a first year student who signed the letter.

The Masters-of-Business-Administration survey, which ranked Harvard after the Stanford, Chicago and MIT business schools, based its ratings on academic evaluations elicited from business school deans. Harvard was ranked second in the same survey last year.

Fouraker attributed the lower rating to the orientation towards research at other business schools, as opposed to Harvard's emphasis on "producing practitioners, not scholars."

"The measure of our success is the lead out graduates have in getting responsible jobs as general managers," Fouraker said. "Some schools have yet to have graduates in executive positions," he added.

Fouraker drew a graph on the meeting room blackboard to show the increasing pay advantages Harvard graduates enjoy compared to graduates from other business schools.

Fears dispelled

"Fouraker's argument dispelled a lot of my fears," Haft said after the meeting. He added that he did not forsee any further student protest about the survey.

In another survey published in the same magazine issue, academic deans rated both Stanford and Harvard first in terms of the "employment value" of their graduates. Harvard students also rate first in employment value by graduates of business administration programs, another survey in the magazine showed.