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.
Table 1. Participating Faculty by Accreditation Status of Reporting School
Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)
Unsurprisingly, given the proportional requirements of Standard 15 and the relative size of the set of accredited versus non-accredited respondents to the BSQ, the SA category forms the majority of participating faculty, though the proportion is certainly higher in the AACSB-accredited schools. What I find interesting here is that the same difference in proportion of such faculty at the non-accredited respondent schools, just over 6 percent, appears to be made up by their faculty whose qualifications include a mixture of academia and professional practice (i.e., either SP or PA).
Table 2. Participating Faculty by Continental Region
Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)
Again, given the requirements of Standard 15, SA faculty are likely to form the majority of participating faculty regardless of where in the world the reporting school is located. However, it is interesting to see that there is still a high degree of variability across geographic regions in terms of how large a majority of SA faculty exists. In particular, schools in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to a slightly lesser extent in Europe, appear to be the most inclined to employ participating faculty of more diverse qualification categories. I should also note that the high proportion of SA faculty in Africa is likely due to the small number of respondents, and that all of those schools are either accredited or in the initial accreditation process.
Table 3. Participating Faculty by Program Levels Offered
Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)
As with the other dimensions discussed above, variance in the types of degrees offered by reporting schools does not preclude the SA category’s prominence. What I find interesting here is that the schools that offer only graduate programs seem to be the most willing to hire participating faculty with more diverse qualification types. In particular, such schools show the largest proportion of SP or PA faculty, which may indicate both the necessity and freedom to include a greater emphasis on the practical knowledge at schools focused entirely on graduate-level studies.
Be on the lookout for the next post in this series, in which I will take a similar look at reported qualification types in supporting faculty!
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