In November, AACSB convened its annual Associate Deans Conference, which brings together a diverse group of business school representatives, from associate deans to faculty. At the conference, we rolled out some of our findings from the 2014–15 Senior Business School Administrators Survey (hereon referred to as the Administrators Survey), including a brief infographic.
The Administrators Survey, conducted triennially with the cooperation of AACSB’s Associate Deans Affinity Group, received participation from over 500 business school administrators with 50 countries represented. The respondents included associate deans, assistant deans, vice deans, and their equivalents serving in colleges or schools of business. Here are just a few highlights from the survey:
- Ninety percent of respondents indicated that they report directly to their dean. On average, respondents indicated having 13 direct reports of their own. An assistant dean from a school in the United States reported having the most faculty direct reports with 35. Another assistant dean from a school in the United States reported having the most staff direct reports with 27.
- Nearly half (42 percent) of the respondents indicated that they had no aspirations of becoming a dean. This lines up well with the results from our 2014–15 Deans Survey, which revealed that 32 percent of responding deans reported having been in an associate dean, assistant dean, or vice dean role prior to their first deanship. This grouping of senior administrators is somewhat newer to their current role, with 69 percent of respondents reporting that they are in their first appointment (with an average of 4.6 years in the role). Many of the administrators are tenured, however, with 83 percent reporting holding tenure (among those in institutions/countries where tenure exists).
- In February, I wrote about the B-School Dean Lingua Franca, which somewhat unsurprisingly was found to be English, with a whopping 90 percent of respondents to the Deans Survey reporting English fluency. The post includes a useful table that details the commonality of English fluency of deans by region, and which helps underline the universal nature of the language among the position. The Administrators Survey unveiled a similar occurrence, with 92 percent of respondents reporting English fluency and an additional 6 percent reporting conversational English proficiency.
- Further, among the Administrators Survey respondents, 33 percent reported speaking two or more languages fluently. Seven percent reported speaking three or more languages fluently. Again, this aligns closely with the findings from the Deans Survey, in which 35 percent of respondents reported speaking two or more languages fluently, and 10 percent reported speaking three or more languages fluently. With respect to languages conversationally spoken, French was the most commonly indicated (15 percent), followed by German and English (both at 6.48 percent).
I will be sharing more data and findings from the Administrators Survey in the coming months. If you are interested in the results of the survey and would like to suggest a focus for a future blog post or to just to chat about b-school administrators, please leave a comment below or send me a message at [email protected].
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