SIGEM 2022: movements confirmed

SIGEM cross-withdrawal data compares schools in pairs, based on where students admitted to both choose to enroll. The ranking that comes out of this data is not very satisfying, because it compares schools one pair at a time rather than all together.

Using the Elo algorithm to rank the schools

DAUR used a well-established ranking method made famous by chess players: the Elo rating. The algorithm builds a ranking from matches between two players. Here, a match between two schools is a choice made by a student admitted to both. To compare all the schools using all the data, the original matrix was turned into a list of matches (about 25,000 a year), and these matches were played (in random order) year by year through the Elo algorithm, which awards points according to the initial probability of winning. DAUR has updated its ranking with SIGEM's 2022 data and added a regression to estimate the 2020 results, which SIGEM did not publish.

The trends seen in 2021 are confirmed.

EDHEC moved ahead of emlyon between 2019 and 2021, the only change in the top 5 business schools (excluding ENS Paris-Saclay and ENSAE Paris). The 2022 edition confirms it: EDHEC is now nearly 400 points ahead of emlyon and 600 points behind ESCP, closing in on the top 3.

SKEMA's rise is the other trend confirmed this year. With 1,698 points, the school is nearing the 2,000-point mark, the level of Audencia in 2010, when it was undisputed sixth. GEM, on the other hand, continues the decline it began in 2016 and is now 116 points behind NEOMA.

Selectivity, another angle

SIGEM publishes no data directly tied to selectivity (for example an equivalent of cross-withdrawals based on admissions), so this year DAUR offers an approximate method to estimate the selectivity of SIGEM schools. We take the schools one by one in order of attractiveness and assign students one by one according to their probability of withdrawing. This gives the average rank of the students who enroll in each school, a method that tends to favor schools with fewer places.

The ranking is close to the attractiveness ranking, except for ENS Paris-Saclay, with only 5 places on SIGEM, and ENSAE Paris (14 places), which gain 2 and 1 places respectively and move ahead of ESCP and ESSEC.