AACSB Data and Research Blog

DataDirect: Turning Data Into Strategic Solutions

By Olga Sholderer

DataDirect was launched in 2005, and since then AACSB International has expanded the variety of surveys offered and has gone global. This year’s Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) has collected responses from 799 business schools, 280 of those outside of the U.S. DataDirect grants access to data on business schools’ institutional characteristics, budgets, faculty, students, and salaries, among others, for schools that participate in the questionnaires. At our recent EMEA Annual Conference in Madrid, we dedicated a session to demonstrating how business schools can use these data for evidence-driven solutions and strategic decision-making in their institutions. Session facilitators Chris Wert, from ISC Paris, and Wilfred Mijnhardt, from Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), shared their experiences using data from AACSB International’s surveys for their schools’ needs.

Wert dedicated a part of the session to using DataDirect for accreditation questions, faculty salary negotiations, and finding new collaborations. Completing the BSQ is obligatory for accredited schools, and its results provide a wide range of data points on business school characteristics, which is necessary for benchmarking during the accreditation process, said Wert. With the help of the BSQ, schools are able to find and compare themselves with their peers. Salary Survey, on the other hand, is helpful during the new faculty recruitment process and allows benchmarking against other business schools’ faculty and administrator salaries for compensation negotiations. Wert mentioned his experience in working with collaborations data, too: “I use the Collaboration Survey, and it is a very good survey. I think it is very important for European schools, even more so than for the Northern American schools, because here the European schools are much more focused on Erasmus, on double degrees, etc. There is a fair amount of good data.”

Mijnhardt shared his experience as a policy director using BSQ data on doctoral programs across AACSB member schools. He used multiple data sources to create a complex dataset to address his areas of interest. Pulling information on PhD enrollments, degrees conferred, and absolute and relative sizes of doctoral programs across a number of European schools enabled RSM to better analyze the current positioning of its school against others. This data helped RSM not only better evaluate the work currently done by the school but also better market the school’s programs. A school is able to compare itself against others and identify its unique characteristics that can be used for promotion of the school among potential students, partners, and donors. Mijnhardt underlined “how valuable AACSB data are if you want to move towards a more analytic perspective and more evidence-based policy support in your school.”

Surveys offered through DataDirect open numerous opportunities for seeking new partnerships, benchmarking against other schools in the areas of students enrollment, faculty numbers, range of programs offered, and faculty and administrator salaries. Frances Bowen from Queen Mary University of London mentioned during the session, “We don’t have an MBA program. It is very interesting to look at the schools and to see MBA versus specialized master’s programs across the schools in the market. Data coupled with professional intuition and judgment can be very helpful here.”

To be able to enjoy all of the benefits of AACSB DataDirect for data-driven solutions at your business school, participate in our currently open surveys or request to have a past survey unlocked for you. To learn more about other ways you can use data from DataDirect, please see our Data Case Guide. To learn more about how to use the system, please refer to our online tutorials or contact us with any questions at [email protected].

Continued Growth in Accessibility of AACSB-Accredited Online Degrees

By Colin Nelson

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:

Figure 1. Number of AACSB-Accredited Schools Reporting Fully Online Programs, by Level

Notes: This chart includes data from a controlled set of 521 accredited schools that responded to the AACSB Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) in all five years. Each school may have more than one fully online program at each level.

Five hundred and twenty-one AACSB-accredited schools, representing 36 countries and territories worldwide, participated in each of the last five annual BSQ surveys. Figure 1 above shows that the proportion of this set of schools that reported offering one or more of their degree programs, at any level, in a fully online delivery format has grown from 25 to 37 percent over the past five years.

While fully online programs at the Masters-Generalist (MBA) level saw the highest rise in absolute number of schools offering them, the percentage gains in the numbers of specialized master’s and especially bachelor’s degree programs offered fully online were significantly more robust (more than 67 and 80 percent increases, respectively, versus 44 percent for the general business master’s programs). In my earlier post, programs at the Masters-Generalist (MBA) level were the primary driver for the increase in schools with fully online programs at any level, so this new data may indicate a shift in focus, at least within this controlled set.

Online doctoral programs remain the notable exception to this trend. None of the schools in the controlled set reported offering a fully online doctoral program. In fact, as of this writing, only one AACSB-accredited school has ever reported a fully online doctoral program on the BSQ, namely the Management School of the University of Liverpool (not a member of the controlled set), which offers a fully online DBA program.

It is also worth noting that the growth in the number of AACSB-accredited schools offering such programs remains almost entirely driven by schools based in the U.S.:

Table 1. Schools Offering Fully Online Programs by Country/Territory

Notes: This table includes data from a controlled set of 521 accredited schools that responded to the AACSB Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) in all five years, and N equals the total number of schools from each country/territory in the set. There were three Chinese schools outside of Hong Kong in the controlled set, but none of them reported fully online programs. Each school may have more than one fully online program at each level.

Although American schools make up about 79 percent of the schools in the total controlled set, they consistently make up 94–95 percent of the schools reporting fully online programs at any level. So why are accredited schools in other countries not showing similar levels of growth in this increasingly popular delivery mode?

For one thing, although the BSQ does not collect data on blended/hybrid programs, we know anecdotally that programs providing some online or asynchronous content are growing in number. It may be that more schools outside the U.S. are opting for blended/hybrid programs versus fully online delivery. Another reason may be that, from the student perspective, the physical location of the school offering fully online programs does not matter as much as the quality of the programs themselves. Nevertheless, as fully online delivery continues to grow in popularity, it will be interesting to see if more schools from all over the world begin to pioneer new programs in cyberspace.

A Focus on Business School Faculty

By Hanna McLeod

In many regards, faculty represent the engine behind the major activities that occur within the business school. They lead research efforts that shape the knowledge created around business, create curricula and learning experiences that prepare tomorrow’s managers and leaders, and engage with various internal and external stakeholders to help the business school follow through on its mission and create impact within its community. Faculty are continually evolving in all that they do and represent within their institutions, and as a result their changing roles, expectations, and perceptions can be challenging to keep up with.

On October 19, AACSB with support from EFMD will launch a survey focusing exclusively on faculty—a first of its kind by AACSB. The study will target business school faculty around the world and shed meaningful light on similarities and differences across different groupings of faculty with regard to their perceptions of expectations, and the degree to which they align with one another, their schools, and overall trends within business schools. The study will explore how these perceptions evolve across the trajectory of a faculty member’s career and what priorities may lie ahead of them in the future. Schools that meet a certain participation threshold will have access to aggregated findings representing their institution, in addition to the capability of being able to compare with aggregated findings from a global set of business schools.

As a faculty member, you are encouraged to participate in order to contribute to and subsequently better understand the environment you work in and, perhaps more importantly, the environment that you may find yourself working in the future. The survey invitation will be sent through the dean or head of the business school, who will also be invited to take an abbreviated version of the survey and distribute across his or her faculty. As a dean, encouraging your faculty to participate will not only grant them an opportunity to have their voices and experiences contribute to the body of knowledge around the faculty career, but it will also provide you with insight on how to create an environment that best aligns with the needs and expectations of your faculty.

As you await to receive the survey invitation in your inbox on October 19, I encourage you to read about some recent insights and data on business faculty:

• View the BizEd September/October 2016 Issue with a focus on faculty
• Explore the 2016 Business School Data Guide and its section on faculty (page 20)
• Watch for the release of 2015–16 Business School Questionnaire custom reporting tools, and create custom comparison groups to benchmark faculty-related data against other schools using DataDirect

Online Course Delivery in the Context of Dutch Management Education

By Olga Sholderer

 

Online education has become increasingly widespread all around the world. For example, as numbers from AACSB International’s 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) show, 13.4 percent of reporting member schools indicated that they provide fully online bachelor’s degrees against only 7.6 percent on the 2009–10 BSQ. Rapid expansion is notable especially in the U.S., where elite universities widely offer courses and full degrees online. For example, Harvard Business School offers an extensive number of online courses through their HBX online program. There are examples of online educational programs existing outside of the U.S., too. For instance, University of Liverpool provides online programs, including an online Doctor of Business Administration degree.

In the Netherlands, a European country that traditionally has been among forerunners in higher education, the future for online education looks promising, too. Although there are no precise numbers on student enrollment to any form of online education at the country level, according to the data presented in a report by SURFNet, most Dutch universities place priority on developing online and blended education offerings and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the next two years. For example, 11 out of 14 research universities and 10 out of 21 vocational universities in the Netherlands report that online education is a central theme for the 2015–2018 period. However, despite these developments, fully online degrees are not prominent in the Dutch business education landscape (with the exception of a few executive online programs). A series of interviews with the deans and management officers of Dutch business schools shows that schools in the Netherlands put effort into developing and implementing blended programs that involve online elements to varying degrees; however, none of the interviewed business schools reported that they plan to develop fully online degrees.

Dutch business schools respond to the demands of the educational sector and incorporate technology in their curricula. Leen Paape, dean of Nyenrode Business University, says, “We run this project on blended learning where we explore what works the best for us; it is a lot about experimenting. No one knows what the best ratio of online and offline activities is so far.” While some schools are only starting to try out this area, others have a long history of using a blended learning approach. Rotterdam School of Management dean, Steef van de Veelde, says, “Professors have already been making class recordings for students for more than 10 years, but it has always been ad-hoc and left to the consideration of the professors.” Now, according to van de Veelde, the school thinks about how to make the learning process more structured, how to use new technology as a part of blended programs, and how to approach grading with these types of programs.

A common practice for blended learning in Dutch business schools is to incorporate MOOCs into course curricula. For instance, Hanze University of Applied Sciences uses MOOCs to support their courses: “Students watch videos online, instead of a teacher explaining the concepts over and over again using the classroom time,” says senior lecturer Uli Mathies. Another example is Rotterdam School of Management’s nine-week course on Innovation Management, which is offered through Coursera: “The idea is that bachelor’s students go online and use it as a bone for their course,” says van de Veelde. Nijmegen School of Management also offers a MOOC, although they have reservations about this method of teaching: “It is good for fields where the knowledge is stable; however, it is rather difficult in such fields as business,” says Nijmegen’s dean, Paul Hendriks. They will run their course on New Business Models in late 2016.

So, if blended learning is on the rise, why then are business schools not experimenting with fully online degrees in the Netherlands? The deans we have interviewed have named two major reasons for this:

-From Dutch schools’ perspective, fully online degrees lack an important social component. “[Fully online degrees] would be possible in other areas, but with business it is not much about knowledge, but a lot about context, group work, and experiential learning. Especially for undergraduate programs, socialization is really important and I don’t think we can replace that,” says van de Veelde. Dean of Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics, Philip Vergauwen, has a similar stance on the issue: “Online components complement the courses but do not substitute for them; there won’t be fully online degrees. We select good students and take them through all learning experience which goes far beyond the knowledge transfer. It involves co-creation, participation, experience-driven learning.” Current studies on online learning also point at common concerns related to socialization: the time lag between interactions and often a lack of clear norms of communication in the case of asynchronous interactions, and a danger of having students staying passive during online group discussions.

-Online education requires advanced technical equipment, financial resources, and training of human resources, and the need for such investments can be a barrier for the Dutch schools. Tilburg University’s dean of education, P.P.M. Joos, and associate dean of internationalization, Henk van Gemert, suggest that if business schools do not invest enough in new online courses, they may end up with unmotivated faculty and technological flaws that may damage the reputation of the school. Since such investments are often difficult to secure, this becomes one of the reasons schools in the Netherlands abstain from developing fully online degrees.  

What’s next then? Han van Dissel, dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Amsterdam, believes that the undergoing shift is inevitable, and as university-level contact time between professors and students decreases, the professor will play a different role, and some part of the learning process will be done online.

Dutch business schools that we talked to share a positive outlook on the future of using online education as a part of the learning process. Schools expand the use of technology in classrooms and replace or complement traditional methods of learning with online elements. Some schools stick to the flipped classroom method, exploring ways that technology can improve students’ learning experience, and experiment with MOOCs; other schools create fully online executive programs. Non-executive online degrees are absent from the Dutch business education landscape, and this absence is attributed by the deans we interviewed to the difficulty of socialization with this learning method as well as financial and technical barriers to implementing fully online programs.

Schools are aware of the upcoming changes in the way educational processes are structured and are ready to tackle it. The numbers in nation-wide reports and interviews with deans of AACSB member schools indicate that the schools are preparing for these upcoming changes and are primed to experiment and innovate in order to meet current challenges.

Tenure Trends in Full-time Faculty

By Colin Nelson

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 in 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.

Figure 1. Percentages of Full-time Faculty by Tenure Status

Source: Controlled set of 494 business schools that reported tenure status data to the BSQ in all five years.

As you can see, the proportion of non-tenure-track full-time faculty has indeed been steadily on the rise, primarily (though not entirely) at the expense of the proportion of tenured faculty. While tenured faculty do not appear to be in any danger of losing their majority status yet, it is worth noting that these proportional patterns persist despite a 5 percent overall increase in the absolute number of full-time faculty reported by this controlled set of schools over the past five years. In fact, when looking at absolute numbers, the total numbers of full-time faculty in the tenured and tenure-track categories have each risen by only 1.5 percent over this period, while the number of non-tenure-track faculty has risen by nearly 19 percent.

Figure 2. Percentages of Tenured or Tenure-Track Full-time Faculty, by World Region

Source: Controlled set of 494 business schools that reported tenure status data to the BSQ in all five years. Note: The European version of the BSQ does not ask for tenure data, and there were too few schools in the set from Africa to include in Figure 2.

Looking across world regions, it seems that the trend toward decreasing use of tenured or tenure-track faculty is more pronounced in some regions than in others. The reporting schools from the Middle and Near East even reverse the trend during this period, with growth in the total numbers of tenured or tenure-track faculty, and shrinkage in the number of non-tenure-track faculty. Nevertheless, for all other world regions in which tenure data are collected, growth in the total numbers of non-tenure-track faculty outpaces growth in the numbers of tenured or tenure-track faculty, often significantly.

Trends at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the U.S.

By Colin Nelson

Because 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). HBCUs are institutions founded prior to 1964, with the express mission of serving African-American students. 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.

Figure 1. Five-Year Enrollment Trends at HBCUs

Note: Proportions come from a controlled set of 9 HBCUs that reported data to the Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) in all five years.

As you can see, total enrollment at the HBCUs in our set has fallen steadily over the past five years, by nearly 20 percent overall. Interestingly, though, enrollment at the graduate level has actually grown by nearly 37 percent at these schools over the last five years, this despite the fact that the number and types of programs have remained fairly stable during this period. Apparently, the decline in enrollment overall is entirely due to declining undergraduate enrollment.

Enrollment is not the only thing declining at HBCU business schools, however.

Figure 2. Five-Year Faculty Trends at HBCUs

Note: Proportions come from a controlled set of 9 HBCUs that reported data to the Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) in all five years.

Although not as drastic as the reductions in enrollment, the total number of full-time (FT) faculty for the controlled set of HBCUs declined by 4.6 percent over the last five years, and the total number of full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty declined by nearly 9 percent. In addition, for this same set of schools, the average annual operating budget also declined by 1.5 percent.

I should note here that the data presented in this post should not be construed as definitive for all 105 currently operating HBCUs in the U.S. Indeed, only 32 of them are members of AACSB International as of this writing (although another 10 schools are former members, and 15-20 percent of all HBCUs are ineligible for membership due to the lack of business programs at the bachelor level or higher). Nevertheless, we are certainly not the only ones to point out the various issues plaguing HBCUs in recent years. As an employee of an organization that cares about diversity as well as quality in higher education, I hope that a path can soon be found to renewed prosperity for these important institutions.

The Decline and Fall of Full-time Faculty?

By Colin Nelson

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?

Figure 1. Five-Year Trends in Faculty Types as Proportions of Total Full-time Equivalent (FTE) Faculty

Source: AACSB Business School Questionnaire (BSQ). Note: Data presented come from a controlled set of 544 AACSB member schools that completed the BSQ in all five years.

In the annual BSQ, we ask our member schools to report the numbers of full-time faculty, as well as the full-time equivalency (or FTE) of their part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Although there is a very slight decline in the overall percentage of full-time faculty as a component of the total FTE faculty for the schools in the last year, the level of change in the full-time component has not been terribly significant over the past five years, proportionally speaking. Even when we look on a per-school basis, the mean FTE of part-time faculty as a percentage of total FTE faculty for the entire controlled set has moved less than a percentage point during that period.

Now, it is true that in terms of absolute numbers, part-time faculty and GTAs have been increasing much faster over this time period than their full-time counterparts (20.7 percent versus 5.6 percent increases, respectively). I should also note here that the figures reported for the FTE of part-time faculty on the BSQ are not a form of head count per se, but rather the result of a formula based on the amount of work performed by such faculty.

In the years to come, it will be interesting to see whether the data presented here will align more closely with the popular narrative. For now, however, it does not appear that full-time faculty at business schools are yet being replaced wholesale by part-time or adjunct counterparts.

Operating Budgets for Technology

By Colin Nelson

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:

Table 1. Change in Technology Expenditures vs. Operating Budgets, 2013-14 to 2014-15

Source: AACSB BSQ Finances Module. Note: The movement types shown represent only those that were actually reported, versus all possible types.

According to the data from Table 1, the absolute amount of operating funds spent on technology rose for over 56 percent of reporting schools from the 2013-14 year to the 2014-15 year. However, contrary to what might be expected, the proportion of the total operating budget devoted to technology uses either went down or stayed flat in over 57 percent of cases.

What is even more interesting is when we compare the results above with the data the schools reported on who controls IT functions for the school (e.g., the school’s parent university, the school itself, or jointly between the two):

Figure 1. Proportional Movement of Technology Expenditures and Operating Budgets, by Control of Institutional IT Functions

Source: AACSB BSQ Finances Module.

While the vast majority of reporting schools’ overall operating budgets rose year over year no matter who controls IT functions at the school, there appears to be a positive correlation between the level of independent control the business school has over IT functions and the absolute amount of funds expended on technology. Over 64 percent of schools that reported that they themselves control their IT functions also reported an increase in the absolute amount of funds expended on technology over the previous year, whereas a slim majority of the schools reporting that their IT functions are controlled by their parent university did not.

At the same time, there appears to be a negative correlation between the level of independent control the business school has over IT functions and the percentage of operating budget expended on technology. Nearly 53 percent of reporting schools indicating that their IT functions are controlled by their parent university also reported an increase in the proportion of their operating budget spent on technology, whereas only about 36 percent of schools that reported that they themselves control their IT functions indicated the same.

Since we have only a couple of years’ worth of data for the Finances Module, it is impossible to determine if these fluctuations represent any sorts of trends as yet, but we will definitely continue to monitor the data we receive to see if any such patterns emerge.

Faculty Qualifications Part II: Supporting Faculty

By Colin Nelson

As promised in my last post, today I discuss the categorization of supporting faculty along several dimensions. Please note that the schools included constitute the same set that I looked at in my last post, but 27 of those schools reported no supporting faculty at all, and have thus been removed from the number of schools in the tables below.

 

Table 1. Supporting Faculty by Accreditation Status of Reporting School

Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)

In contrast to the participating faculty, those who are deemed supporting faculty are more likely to be classified as Instructional Practitioners (IP) than any other qualification category defined in Standard 15. Even more so than with Scholarly Academic (SA) participating faculty, the proportion of IP-qualified supporting faculty is significantly higher in the AACSB-accredited schools; however, in this case the difference is likely due to a similarly higher proportion of supporting faculty in the non-accredited schools that have not yet been classified. This makes sense, given that those schools that have not yet attained accreditation would be less likely to have made such classification a priority.

 

Table 2. Supporting Faculty by Continental Region

Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)

Since 60 percent of the reported supporting faculty in this set are from schools in Northern America, it is clear that the overall worldwide figures are somewhat skewed in favor of Northern American proportions, but it is still interesting to look at the relative proportions across geographic regions. Unlike with SA-qualified participating faculty, only Africa and Northern America show clear majorities of supporting faculty classified as any of the four qualification categories. While it is true that supporting faculty from schools in the other regions are classified as IP more often than not (when classified at all), it is nevertheless clear that these schools are much more likely to employ SAs or Practice Academics (PAs) as supporting faculty, as well.

 

Table 3. Supporting Faculty by Program Levels Offered

Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)

As with AACSB Accreditation, the program levels offered by reporting schools appear to make major and interesting differences in their proportional complement of supporting faculty qualifications. Again, supporting faculty are classified as IP more often than not, regardless of program levels offered, but only those schools that offer undergraduate programs and not doctoral programs show clear majorities of such faculty. Schools that offer doctoral programs, or that do not offer undergraduate programs, are significantly more likely to have SA and, to a lesser extent, PA supporting faculty, which makes sense given that they would need more scholarly support in order to focus on higher-level degree programs. Interestingly, schools that offer only undergraduate programs are apparently by far the most likely type of school to have PA supporting faculty.

Faculty Qualifications Part I: Participating Faculty

By Colin Nelson

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!