AACSB International's collaboration with the MBA CSEA yields a large amount of useful data for tracking trends in the post-graduation employment of full-time MBA graduates. In this post, I explore trends in the types of industries in which MBA grads find employment. Continue reading

Among the most important objectives that business schools ultimately have is to ensure that their students prepared for the careers they will pursue post-graduation. One aspect of the data AACSB International collects from schools that participate in the Employment Module of our annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) measures how successful their graduates are in obtaining employment after earning their degrees. Continue reading

We have continued exploring potential alternate parameters for categorizing schools according to size. This post explores the impact on the number of schools classified as small, medium and large—if the parameters are changed from the standard parameters based on counts of full-time faculty to the various alternate parameters mentioned in Part I. We look at that impact at subsets of AACSB member schools offering different combinations of degree levels. Continue reading

Historically, AACSB International has classified business school size categories by the number of full-time (FT) faculty reported on the annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), according to the following parameters: small (35 or fewer), medium (36-74), and large (75 or more). Since the recent release of the BSQ data from the 2016-17 iteration of the survey, however, we decided to explore some other potential parameters for size categorization, to see whether any significant differences would result. For the purpose of this experiment, we chose total overall enrollment, the numbers of full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty (the sum of the headcount of FT faculty and the reported FTE of part-time faculty), and student/faculty ratios for both FT and FTE faculty totals as new. alternate parameters. Continue reading

September 2017 will mark the opening of the 50th iteration of AACSB’s annual Salary Survey. On this 50th anniversary, in order to better serve our global membership’s needs for pertinent staffing and compensation data, AACSB will be enfolding the Salary Survey into a more holistic data collection instrument, which we will be renaming the Staff Compensation and Demographics Survey. This move will align the two previously independent but complementary data sets in the former version of the Salary Survey and the Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), allowing us to connect our members with more relevant, contextualized, and timely data on business school faculty and staffing, while also giving them better tools with which to benchmark against their peers. Continue reading

As promised in my last post, today I explore associations between the business school activity priorities reported on the annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) by AACSB member schools, and their reported faculty gender balance. As a reminder, the activity priority codes reported on the BSQ reflect one dimension of diversity in business school missions by identifying the rank-order prioritization of intellectual contributions, teaching, and service. There seems to be a small but clear progression in average gender balance based on whether schools reported emphasizing intellectual contributions (ICs) over teaching, or vice versa. Continue reading

In the annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) that goes out to all member schools of AACSB International (The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), we ask for data on each business school's priorities when it comes to different types of mission-based activity. These data points are unique to AACSB, and help us to connect our members to their peer schools, who report similar emphases. Continue reading

As promised in my last post, here is a preview of the 2016–17 data from the BSQ Employment Module’s MBA CSEA sections. Continue reading

For the past three years, AACSB has collaborated with the MBA Career Services Employer Alliance (MBA CSEA) to deliver their annual survey of MBA graduate data in conjunction with the Employment Module of AACSB’s Business School Questionnaire (BSQ). Among the many data points gathered by this survey are data on the starting salaries of MBA graduates by a number of factors, including the industry in which they receive employment, the geographic location of their employment, their level of pre-MBA program work experience, and more. Continue reading

I’ve received a number of requests recently for an update to a post I wrote back in January 2013, regarding the trend toward greater numbers of AACSB-accredited schools offering fully online degree programs at various levels. It looks like this trend has only continued in the intervening years. Continue reading

By far one of the most popular queries we here at AACSB receive is regarding information about how a degree from an AACSB-accredited school contributes to the career of those who receive it. As we prepare to release the data from the 2015-16 iteration of the AACSB BSQ Employment Module survey, I thought I might treat our readers to a preview of the data that can help to shed light on that question. Continue reading

Much has been said (or misstated) about systems of academic tenure in higher education. One of the more popular narratives is that tenure as an established practice is on its way out, for better or for worse. Since AACSB International tracks the numbers of full-time faculty who are tenured, tenure-track, or non-tenure-track on the annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), I thought it might be instructive to examine trends over time to see if our data bear out the popular narrative. Continue reading

Since February is African-American History Month in the U.S., it seems an appropriate time to examine trends in the business schools of those institutions that have been designated by the U.S. Department of Education as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). In terms of business education, HBCUs are collectively responsible for producing 21 percent of all business and management degrees earned by African-American students in the U.S. Continue reading

A popular narrative in higher education today involves the rise of part-time and/or adjunct faculty as an increasingly significant proportion of the total faculty composition. The reasons behind, and implications of, such a trend are many and varied, but no one appears to question the fact that it is happening. Anecdotally, many business schools appear to buy into the idea, but what do the data say? Continue reading

As technology becomes more pervasive in higher education, as well as more necessary to business schools’ operations, one might expect to see it become a larger portion of the schools’ overall operating budget. To see if this was indeed the case, I compared the figures for total operating budgets and amounts used for technology purposes for the 114 AACSB members that reported such information in both the 2013-14 and the 2014-15 BSQ Finance Module surveys. Continue reading

As promised in my last post, today I discuss the categorization of supporting faculty along the same set of dimensions as I did with the participating faculty. Continue reading

Now that the 2013 AACSB Accreditation Standards have been in place for a couple of years, a large majority of AACSB member schools are now comfortable classifying their faculty into the new qualification categories defined in Standard 15 (i.e., Scholarly Academic or SA, Scholarly Practitioners or SP, Instructional Practitioners or IP, and Practice Academics or PA). In fact, of the 770 total schools that participated in the 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), approximately 73 percent were able to report their faculty strength in those terms, broken out by participating versus supporting faculty. In this post, I discuss the categorization of participating faculty along several dimensions. Continue reading

As promised in my last post, part II of this series will explore some of the 2014–15 BSQ Finances Module data that have to do with how decision-making is handled by AACSB members across the world, with regard to determining operating budgets and allocating resources. In the BSQ Finances Module survey, we include nine to 12 stakeholder groups (depending on whether the school is independent or attached to a parent university), and ask respondents to indicate their relative levels of involvement in, and/or influence over, the budgeting and allocation processes. Continue reading

As we approach the release of the 2014-15 BSQ Finances Module data, the time seemed ripe to explore some of the preliminary data that were reported by our participating schools this year regarding governance structures. In particular, I was interested to see how decision-making is handled for various aspects of business school governance by our AACSB members across the world. Continue reading

The BSQ Finances Module, the first in a series of planned modules of the Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), was released this year concurrently with the annual BSQ. By means of this module, AACSB International has gathered robust data on governance models within business schools for the first time. Continue reading

In past posts, I have touched on the subject of business school activity in the realm of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which over the short period of time I looked at them previously had begun to grow rapidly. Today, however, there is a sea change in both the quantity and types of institutions offering MOOCs in the business education space, in the types of instructors teaching them, and, especially, in the types of courses being offered. Continue reading

A portion of the annual Collaborations Survey is devoted to “Desired Collaborations,” allowing schools to report on partnerships that they do not yet have, but would like to establish. The practical use of desired collaborations data to our membership is obvious. Continue reading

In Part II of this series, I discussed various factors relating to the uses of business school operating funds for salary purposes. In this third part, I will talk about the non-salary expenditures by business schools. Continue reading

In the annual BSQ Finances Module, we ask participating schools to break down their uses of operating funds by a large number of different categories, in order to understand how they are used by our members. In this second part of my series on the factors relating to the uses of business school operating funds, I will concentrate on the usage types for salary purposes, and I will cover non-salary uses by type in Part III. Continue reading

With the greater detail afforded by the new BSQ Finances Module, we can now analyze different ways in which business schools are using their operating budgets. In the first part of this series of posts, I want to explore how school size and relationships with their parent university/institution (if any) interact with the way that operating funds are channeled by AACSB member business schools. Continue reading