The target population of this study is prospective or recently-enrolled students of business schools. For the purpose of this research we refer to this population as prospective students. This study presents the results of exploratory research effort that aimed to investigate several matters:
(1) attitudes of the prospective students towards the official criteria used by business school rankings and towards the university selection criteria in general;
(2) the possibility to group such criteria based on the responses of the target population;
(3) the possibility to group the target population based on their preference of the aforementioned criteria. Besides, we tested whether two particular criteria were of importance for the said category of stakeholders, namely, internationality and state exam scores.

The data were collected during June-September 2023 through a survey targeting potential prospective students of undergraduate or graduate levels of business or management programs at the same Russian business school. The survey consisted of 124 questions total. The questions were related to both socio-demographic data and the criteria of choice of educational institution and program. The respondents were asked to evaluate the importance for the offered criteria related to the university and business school choice. The analysis of the survey data employed categorical principal component analysis to group the criteria, followed by cluster analysis using the Ward.D method with Euclidean metric.

The survey yielded 110 responses, which were confidential, with 74% of the respondents being female and the average age of 19 years old; the sample represents 12 geographical regions of Russia; 81% of the sample were considering applying for or have recently enrolled to undergraduate programs and 21% - graduate programs.

The responses related to 22 criteria of the university choice were categorized into eight factors:
(1) quality practice-oriented education,
(2) high level of teaching confirmed with accreditation,
(3) social support,
(4) research and quality assurance,
(5) international collaboration,
(6) extracurricular activities,
(7) career perspectives,
(8) family financial situation.

The 11 criteria of a university business school choice were grouped as four factors:
(9) school reputation,
(10) internationalism,
(11) social responsibility of the school, and
(12) quality of students.

The factors for a university business school choice were ranked by % of variance: from the highest - international experience (36%), through the social responsibility of the school (15%) and its reputation (13%), to the lowest - the quality of student training (11%). Further, the respondents were grouped into three clusters: clusters 1 (n=49) prioritizing factor internationalism, cluster 2 (n=36) prioritizing the factor of reputation, and cluster 3 (n=25) with the leading factors being related to state exam scores, wages upon graduation, social responsibility of the school, and education fees. The main differences between the clusters are that prospective students from cluster 3 were less informed about the business school than respondents from clusters 1 and 2. For a more detailed study of this issue further research with the increased sample population is required. The findings of this study can be taken into consideration by policy-makers for business schools curricula and marketing campaign design, as well as for the design of a new ranking.