The Financial Times has unveiled its definitive survey of faculty research at business schools worldwide, with Boston College’s Carroll School of Management maintaining its position among the top 20 institutions on that global list.
This year, the Carroll School ranks 20th in the world for faculty research productivity and quality—32 notches above its research ranking in 2006. That’s when the School first appeared in these annual compilations.
The survey puts the Carroll School in notable company. Directly ahead in the rankings are Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Just behind is the Ross School at the University of Michigan. At number 20, the Carroll School is also tied with INSEAD (which has campuses in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East).
Altogether, 100 institutions are ranked for research by the Financial Times. Others include the schools of management at Yale (32), Notre Dame (48), and Georgetown (27). The FT survey is an empirically based assessment of research by management faculties, measuring how much they publish and in what journals.
“This is one indication that we’re on the right track at the Carroll School,” said John and Linda Powers Family Dean Andy Boynton, referring to the survey. “We’re hiring faculty who do superb research, right up there with the best in the world—the elite research institutions. And our faculty are great teachers, too.”
As part of a long-range strategic plan announced in 2006, the Carroll School declared research excellence as one of its highest priorities, on a level with teaching excellence. “We’ve been striving to build a research culture that’s every bit as robust as the teaching culture here at the Carroll School and at BC generally,” said Boynton, who became dean in 2005. “All those efforts by everyone at the Carroll School, and of course most of all our faculty, have been paying off.”
The dean pointed to rapidly increasing financial as well as technical support for faculty research projects and exploration, along with a vibrant research culture. This culture has included a weekly array of research presentations and seminars coordinated by the School and its departments, featuring both Carroll School faculty and outside experts from across the spectrum of management disciplines.
“We’ve also instituted and refined ways of tracking and strengthening faculty performance,” Boynton added, citing the Carroll School’s “Research Reports”—summaries compiled every spring that capture the quantity and quality of each faculty member’s research. Similarly, he pointed to the School’s “Teaching Reports,” which offer several key metrics drawn annually from student evaluations and other University data.
The Financial Times reported that its 2019 research ranking was “calculated according to the number of articles published by current full-time faculty members” in 50 prestigious journals between January 2016 and October 2018. (It “combines the absolute number of publications with the number weighted relative to the faculty’s size,” FT says.) Publication in the so-called “FT 50” serves as a measure of research quality as well as productivity.
The methodology can cause fluctuation from year to year. In 2018, the Carroll School climbed to number 13 in the survey; its average ranking over the past five years is 25.
Boynton vowed: “We’ll remain steadfast in what we’re doing—creating a great culture of both teaching and research excellence.”
William Bole is senior writer and editor at the Carroll School.