Forget about quality teachers or strong curricula, corporate recruiters are all about the rankings, according to a new survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council.

By John A. Byrne, contributor

(poetsandquants.com) -- MBA rankings, the bane of every B-school dean, are more important to corporate recruiters than the quality of a school's MBA curriculum and especially the quality of a school's faculty, according to new research from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).

The news will hardly delight B-school administrators or faculty members who often view business school rankings with great disdain. But the new study, released this week by GMAC, shows that school rankings are now the fourth most important criteria MBA employers use when deciding which campuses to recruit from. And when you add other specific criteria that are directly related to rankings, such as the "global recognition of the business school" and the "local reputation" of a school, rankings exert even more of an influence.

The quality of students remains the single most important criteria, cited by 72% of the recruiters, followed by past experience at a given school (48%) and existing relationships at a school (39%).

Student quality has been the number one criterion since GMAC conducted its first corporate recruiters survey in 2001-2002 and it is the most important consideration regardless of a company's location, industry, or size, according to the study. More