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.
Our data show how business schools prioritize two primary types of activity: general school activities such as teaching, research, and service (coded as BPA-1 through BPA-7 in the visualization below); and types of research activity, including contributions to practice, discipline-based scholarship, and learning & pedagogical research (coded as BPB-1 through BPB-13). Each school that completes the BSQ is asked to identify how they prioritize these activity types from among a number of possible combinations, as shown below:
Figure 1. Prioritization of Business School Activities
Source: AACSB BSQ. Note: These figures do not represent a controlled set of schools across all years. All BSQ participants in each academic year are included. Please scroll down for the "full-screen" button to see the whole display.
Interestingly, activity priority codes that hold teaching as either the highest, or one of the highest, priority activities were consistently chosen 88 percent of the time by the whole population of reporting schools. Even when one limits the sample to AACSB-accredited schools, the ratio only drops by one percentage point. By contrast, activity priority codes that place the highest priority on intellectual contributions (singularly or jointly) were only chosen between 52-55 percent of the time by the whole population of reporting schools, or between 55-57 percent by accredited schools.
BPA-1 and BPA-5 are consistently the most frequently chosen activity priority codes, together accounting for over two thirds of all reporting schools in each year. However, it is interesting to note that BPA-5 (which gives equally high priority to teaching and intellectual contributions) overtakes BPA-1 (which places teaching alone as the highest priority) as the most popular choice after the 2012-13 BSQ, particularly among AACSB-accredited schools. It will be worth watching to see whether the emphasis on intellectual contributions catches up to that placed on teaching in years to come.
Similarly, discipline-based scholarship, which we define as “the creation of new knowledge”, is consistently given the highest research priority (singularly or jointly) by approximately 70 percent of all reporting schools each year. Indeed, BPB-1 (which gives higher priority to discipline-based scholarship, medium to contributions to practice, and lower to learning & pedagogical research) is consistently the most popular choice amongst the research priority codes across all years, garnering over a quarter of all reporting schools in each year, whether one controls for accreditation status or not.
By contrast, learning & pedagogical research, which we define as “the enhancement of the educational value of instructional efforts of the institution or discipline”, ekes out only slightly more than a quarter of all reporting schools giving it highest research priority each year, while contributions to practice occupies a middle ground between the two in terms of emphasis.
Please look out for my next post, in which I plan to explore connections between the activity and research priorities and the gender balance of full-time faculty!
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