This post originally appeared on the U.S. News–Strictly Business MBA Admissions Blog

I must confess; I’m a sucker for surveys. Whether it’s from a favorite website, magazine, or even my cable provider, I can usually be counted on to share my opinions, because I believe consumer feedback is one of the best tools companies have to improve their products and services. As an M.B.A. admissions consultant, I like to get feedback from my clients from time to time, so my company can better tailor its services to help them achieve their educational and professional goals. With that in mind, Stacy Blackman Consulting surveyed 652 business school applicants in February 2012 to find out what matters most to today’s applicants and why.

When you consider the hefty price tag that accompanies an M.B.A. degree from a top-tier business school, it comes as little surprise that prospective applicants consider ranking and reputation the two most influential factors when deciding which programs to target. There’s a level of credibility automatically conferred to certain schools, and by extension, to their graduates, and many applicants rightly believe they will benefit considerably by attending an M.B.A. program with an outstanding pedigree. This is especially true as the public bruising some schools took during the financial crisis becomes more of a distant memory.

While reputation is a legitimate consideration in the selection process, placing a heavy emphasis on rankings can actually become a distraction for some applicants. Two thirds of respondents to my survey said that a school’s rankings are “extremely important,” while another one third categorized rankings as “somewhat important” and less than 1 percent of those polled said rankings are “not at all important” to them. I’m always surprised by the extreme interest in rankings, which are, after all, rather fleeting. You may have your sights set on the “No. 1″ school, but a decade from now, that same stellar program might have slipped to number 10.

Take my alma mater, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, as an example. Forbes magazine ranked Kellogg 7th in 2011; the 2012 Financial Times Global M.B.A. Rankings puts Kellogg at 16th; and U.S. News ranks Kellogg somewhere within the top 10 in its upcoming 2013 Best Graduate Schools rankings, out March 13.

Each publication uses somewhat different methodology in its ranking process. For instance, one might place greater emphasis on return on investment, job placement rate, or alumni satisfaction levels. While rankings should inform your decision of where to apply, I think applicants would do well to focus more on a program’s culture, size, or the strength of its alumni network. Fewer than 12 percent of survey respondents considered culture a top priority, and a mere handful noted that program content was the most important factor influencing the decision to attend a particular business school. I find these results troubling, because it means people aren’t paying enough attention to the program that’s truly a good fit for them.

Although some schools, including Kellogg, plan to refocus their energies on the one-year M.B.A. program going forward, 89 percent of those surveyed said they are considering a two year, full-time M.B.A. program. And while applicants traditionally have applied to an average of three schools, that trend has shifted, with 21 percent of respondents applying to five business schools, 14 percent applying to six, and 8.3 percent applying to eight or more.

Most of my clients apply to one to four schools each, so I wonder whether applicants might think they’ll apply to more programs until it dawns on them just how much work is involved in drafting a customized application for each school. In the end, aiming to submit about four to six applications is a good strategy, because you really want to diversify and not get hung up on one or two schools.

The survey also drove home one important point, and it’s one I think the schools should take note of: When asked which standardized test applicants did or would submit, a whopping 97 percent indicated that the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) is still the exam of choice for b-school admissions. Despite the buzz over the number of M.B.A. programs now accepting the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), applicants seem to have trouble believing the schools really do accept it without a negative bias.

This is a message that M.B.A. programs need to better communicate with prospective students if they hope to diversify their applicant pool by accepting the GRE as an alternative in the admissions process

This post originally appeared on the U.S. News–Strictly Business MBA admissions blog.

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management recently announced sweeping changes designed to transform business education and thought leadership in the 21st century. As a Kellogg alumna, I was immediately intrigued. This new framework, billed as Envision Kellogg, follows an intensive 18-month, 360-degree assessment that involved hundreds of alumni, faculty, administrators, students, corporate partners, and others.

To keep pace with the global marketplace and prepare tomorrow’s business leaders for what Dean Sally Blount calls the emerging “collaboration economy,” Kellogg will refocus its energies to double or even triple enrollment in the one-year M.B.A. program while scaling back its full time, two-year program by as much as 25 percent. While applications to the full-time program dipped by 5.6 percent last year—a phenomenon felt by many top-tier programs—the one-year M.B.A. program, designed for those who have an undergraduate business degree, saw increased interest.

Shrinking the traditional M.B.A. program to the size it was circa 1995 is a move that makes the school less U.S.-centric, Blount tells The Economist, noting that 20-something students from China and India increasingly shun the idea of leaving the workforce for two years. “If you think your job is to give out two-year M.B.A.’s in the U.S., you are missing the boat,” says the dean. “You have to be realistic about what the needs of the marketplace are when people are paying for their degrees.”

In an effort to better understand and adapt to this new world, Kellogg also plans an aggressive curriculum overhaul over the next two years that veers away from focusing on individual academic departments to concentrate on overarching concepts designed to cross all academic disciplines. These four so-called impact areas are: markets, customers, and growth; innovation and entrepreneurship; private enterprise/public policy interface; and “architectures of collaboration,” which can be described as using technology to manage relationships with suppliers and customers.

“It is an alternative model of general management education,” Blount tells the blog Poets & Quants. “We’ve created these four impact areas because the problems businesses need to solve don’t fall into a single disciplinary bucket anymore. We will reorganize how we do our research and what we have in our curriculum. We are trying to get out of this 20th Century, overly-siloed way of teaching business.”

Also on the agenda: increasing the school’s global footprint. Kellogg is poised to expand its presence in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) through new partnerships and short-term certification programs with Fundação Dom Cabral in Brazil and the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in China, as well as deepen ties with the Indian School of Business.

The boldest moves often come with detractors, and the planned transformation at Kellogg is no exception. Some critics worry that shifting focus to a one-year M.B.A. class will splinter the school’s cohesive culture or jeopardize Kellogg’s collegial spirit. As both an alumna and an admissions consultant, I don’t see the move as a one-versus-two; rather, I see Kellogg shifting the makeup of the program to better fit the demands of the very strongest, high-potential students. These changes address different people with different needs and trajectories, but it’s still one culture and one school.

Will it all work? Probably not, though the only way to know for sure is to try. The world is changing, business is changing, and schools need to constantly experiment and evolve. Having met Dean Blount, I would argue that her focus is very much on cementing Kellogg’s No. 1 spot and doing so by not sticking with the status quo. Her energy, vision, and guts made quite an impression; she’s not only in touch with where Kellogg is, what needs to stay the same, and what needs to change—she’s also bold enough to go for it.