By Elliot Davis
If you’ve been tapped into the news regarding higher education and business schools lately, you may be concerned by some of the words being used to describe the current landscape. There have been cries of enormous upheavals occurring at business schools, describing these changing times as any one of a slew of natural disasters, like the higher education tsunami, or earthquake, or avalanche. With this whirlwind landscape in a constant state of flux, how have business schools adapted their program offerings to the changing environment?
Using a controlled set of AACSB Accredited schools that responded to the Business School Questionnaire over the past five years, the following chart shows the percentage gains and declines in program offerings by discipline across all educational levels.
Source: AACSB Business School Questionnaire, 2008-2009 to 2012-2013. Controlled set of AACSB Accredited Schools Reporting in all 5 Years. N = 493.
I was immediately struck by the large falloff in e-business and e-commerce programs. This program has seen a whopping 46.81 percent dip over the five year time frame. On the flip side, business ethics including corporate social responsibility has seen a 37.50 percent increase over that same period.
The following are the programs that have seen the greatest increases and decreases over this time frame:
To drill down further, the following dashboard shares more details by displaying the changes broken down by educational level and the number of programs being reported.
Is what we are seeing occur here in business school programming reflective of the times? When we look at the next five years’ worth of data, what programs will have seen the largest growth and largest decline?
This article is very well-written, so kudos to you, Mr. Davis. Although the steep drop in e-business and e-commerce is awfully concerning, I'm glad to see that ethics and entrepreneurship programs are rising.
Posted by: James Hanson, the Bagger | 17 December 2014 at 16:17