AACSB Data and Research Blog

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.

The Percentage of Women as Full-Time Faculty at U.S. Business Schools: Surging Ahead, Lagging Behind, or Stalling Out?

By Jessica Brown

Many different academic disciplines and professions face difficulties in addressing diversity within their workforces. The situation is definitely not unknown in business and management education fields, but, with all of the work aimed toward increasing diversity in higher education, it is a prime time to review some facets of diversity within the business school frame of reference.

Gender diversity among the faculty at a business school is perceived as one of the areas where schools can put into practice the important foundational work of being relevant, supportive, and welcoming in working with female students. This makes the question of female faculty important not just at a school administration level of inclusivity but in having a diverse faculty as a support system for a diverse student body, as well.

AACSB currently gathers gender data for full-time faculty through both its Salary Survey (per individual) and its Business School Questionnaire (in aggregate for the school). Collecting this information allows us to examine the full-time faculty makeup at participating AACSB member schools for any changes and trends relating to faculty gender.

In looking at the percentages for the United States from 2006–07 through 2015–16, you can see that there has been a slow but steady increase (from 26.9 percent to 31.2 percent) in full-time faculty reported as female when looking across all disciplines and faculty ranks combined (fig. 1). But does this tell us the whole story?

 Figure 1: Overall Percentage of Full-Time Faculty by Gender—United States

Note: Controlled set of 401 schools that provided full-time faculty genders on the Salary Survey in 2006–07, 2009–10, 2012–13, and 2015–16.

What Happens If We Analyze the Data by Faculty Rank Instead?

Interestingly, there is also growth in the percentage of full-time faculty reported as female in all faculty ranks except Instructor, where there has been a bit of a decrease (fig. 2). Other than at the Instructor rank, women have increased as a proportion of faculty within each academic rank.

The largest gains from this perspective are within the Associate Professor and Professor ranks, with 32.3 percent of all Associate Professors and 20.2 percent of all Professors being reported as female in 2015–16. These two ranks still have the smallest overall percentages of female faculty, but the steady increases are a good sign that these ranks are also trending toward a more balanced overall gender ratio over time.

 Figure 2: Percentage of Female Full-Time Faculty Within Each Faculty Rank—United States

Note: Controlled set of 401 schools that provided full-time faculty genders on the Salary Survey in 2006–07, 2009–10, 2012–13, and 2015–16.

What Happens When We Compare Full-Time Female Faculty to the Total Full-Time Faculty Reported?

We know that women made up 26.9 percent of full-time faculty in 2006–07, which increased to 31.2 percent in 2015–16, and we further know that percentages of women within each faculty rank other than Instructor have increased, but let’s look next at how those work out when we examine the faculty within each rank as a percentage across the total full-time faculty reported within this comparison group.

Taking this view helps to control for the differences in overall hiring at the different faculty ranks, so when looking at these percentages, use this to compare to the entire business school full-time faculty. As an example, Figure 3 below shows that 5.8 percent of female full-time faculty held the Instructor rank in 2006–07, but by 2015–16 the number had increased to 7.4 percent. This shows that while the proportion of Instructors reported as female has declined (fig. 2), the proportion of the total faculty count made up of Instructors reported as female has increased (fig. 3). Reviewing the underlying data to better contextualize how this happens shows that, while there has been an increase of 43.2 percent in the number of female Instructors since 2006–07, this growth has been outpaced by an increase of 58.4 percent in the number of male instructors in the same timeframe.

 Figure 3: Female Full-Time Faculty by Rank as a Percentage of Overall Full-Time Faculty—United States

Note: Controlled set of 401 schools that provided full-time faculty genders on the Salary Survey in 2006–07, 2009–10, 2012–13, and 2015–16.

So Where Does This Leave Us? Surging, Lagging, or Stalling?

Based on this data set—none of the above. It is clear that there has been significant growth in female faculty both as a percentage within ranks and as an overall percentage of full-time faculty, but the growth has been slow and steady so far. It is encouraging that female faculty are continuing to be a growing and important part of business schools, but we still have lots of progress yet to make and even more data to review to help us on our way.

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.

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!

Models of Governance (Part I)

By Colin Nelson

In our efforts to continuously improve the level and quality of data we are able to provide, AACSB International has begun the process of modularizing our largest and most comprehensive annual survey, the Business School Questionnaire (BSQ). The goal of this process is to streamline the main BSQ, while simultaneously affording our members the opportunity to drill down in greater detail in areas of particular interest to them.

Our first such spinoff, the BSQ Finances Module, was released this February concurrently with the main BSQ. The Finances Module is designed to capture more of the data and information our members have been requesting about the financial and governance models used by business schools around the world. With 346 participants, representing 26 countries and territories around the world, our initial run of the new module has been very successful in yielding robust data and new insights into these areas that have historically been lightly or even entirely unexplored.

Some of the most important such areas are the models of governance used at AACSB member schools. For example, one of the basic questions respondent schools answer is to define their relationship with a parent university or other institution. We offer three basic categories:

A) Standard Academic Unit of Parent Institution: The business school is one academic unit among several others, all of which are part of a larger parent university (or other academic institution) from which it derives degree-granting authority (e.g., Auckland University of Technology Business School, Universidad ICESI’s Facultad de Ciencias Administrativas y Economicas, Sauder School of Business at University of British Columbia, etc.).

B) Semi-/Mostly Autonomous Unit of Parent Institution: The business school is a semi- or mostly autonomous academic unit, but still derives degree-granting authority from a larger parent university or other academic institution (e.g., HEC Montréal, Porto Business School, UCLA Anderson School of Management, etc.).

C) Independent Institution: The business school is an independent academic institution with its own degree-granting authority, not attached to or dependent on any other academic institution (e.g., BI Norwegian Business School, EMLYON, Insper Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa, etc.).

Interestingly, while over 90 percent of respondents classified themselves as Type A, there appear to be strong regional concentrations among those schools that did not:

Table 1. Reporting School Relationship Types by Region

Region	Relationship Type
	A	B	C
Asia (n=12)	10	1	1
Europe (n=30)	18	4	8
Latin America & Caribbean (n=3)	2	0	1
Northern America (n=295)	285	8	2
Oceania (n=6)	6	0	0

 

Two thirds of all the schools that classified themselves as independent standalone business schools (Type C) were European. Indeed, 40 percent of all European respondents indicated that they were not Type A, which leads me to believe that a greater degree of overall autonomy is much more the norm for business schools in Europe than for their counterparts in regions like Northern America or Oceania. I will dig deeper into this issue in my next post, when I plan to drill down more into the results of some of our more detailed aspects of functional autonomy.

Interestingly though, 61.5 percent of the schools that self-identified as Type B were located in Northern America. While I don’t expect that the model of more autonomous business units will become the norm in Northern America to the same degree that it is in Europe, I do think it will be interesting to watch and see if the proportion of non-Type A schools in Northern America grows over time.

Another interesting correlation I noticed was that a business school's level of independence (as indicated by its choice of relationship type) appears directly related to its size (as measured by its full-time faculty strength):

Figure 1. Reporting School Relationship Types by Faculty Size

As you can see, larger schools have progressively greater chances of being semi- or completely autonomous. Indeed, large schools (i.e., those with over 75 full-time faculty members), are more than six times as likely to be Type C as small schools (i.e., those with 35 or fewer full-time faculty), and more than twice as likely to be Type C as medium-sized schools.

U.S. Minority Student – Faculty Ratios Remain High

By Hanna McLeod

Trends within underrepresented minority populations at AACSB schools and within education in general, has long been a topic of significant interest to the public. As Elliot Davis mentions in an earlier blog post, AACSB continues to support and explore initiatives that aim to increase minority representation – both by students and faculty – within business schools.

The tables below show a glimpse of some of these trends, specifically a five year comparison within AACSB-accredited schools regarding undergraduate enrollment, faculty counts, and their respective ratios, for American Indian/Native American, Black/non-Hispanic, Hispanic, and White/non-Hispanic populations. *Business School Questionnaire (BSQ); 371 U.S. AACSB-accredited schools that reported this data in both given years

 An initial observation is that faculty counts for the three listed minority populations have increased in that five year period, while undergraduate enrollment has seen significant drops except for the Hispanic population, which has grown by more than 14 percent. In light of this growth, however, the undergraduate student to faculty ratio for the Hispanic population at AACSB schools remains high, actually increasing in that time period to 146 Hispanic students for every Hispanic faculty member. From this data one can assume that although AACSB schools are experiencing growth in Hispanic undergraduate enrollment and faculty numbers, the rate of growth is still not fast enough for improvements in lower student to faculty ratios in the undergraduate classroom, particularly in comparison with the other groups. Does this data mirror minority trends and representation at your business school? What other observations do you think are interesting to note?

 

Collaboration Activity Part II: Partner Preferences

By Colin Nelson

Another of the most important things we track in AACSB International’s Collaborations Survey is the degree of interest our participating schools indicate in partnering with different countries and regions around the world:

Figure 1. Country Pairs

 

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As you can see, schools in some countries are demonstrating clear preferences for partnerships with institutions in certain specific other countries (and regions). For example, reporting schools in China are much more likely to partner with schools in the U.S. or other Chinese schools than they are with those in the other BRICS nations (e.g., Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa). Indeed, American partners seem to be in high demand all over the world, as they make up approximately 16.8 percent of all named partners in the survey, the highest percentage of any nation in the world.

While the countries with the largest numbers of partnerships are not terribly surprising in terms of who they are, I did find it interesting to look at them in terms of how many institutions were named versus the total number of partnerships:

Table 1. Top Ten Countries by Total Partnerships

Source: AACSB International Collaborations Survey 2012-13.

What I find interesting is the wide variance in the ratios of total partnerships to number of named partners, even in this relatively small set of the most popular countries in which to find partners. What this seems to indicate is that even though the U.S. has many more total partnerships and named partners than Australia, for example, Australian partner institutions are much more likely to have a larger number of schools reporting partnerships with them. This illustrates that there are multiple dimensions to consider when we are looking at which partners are most attractive to business schools.

Collaboration Activity Part I: How Globalizing Is It?

By Colin Nelson

In AACSB International’s Collaborations Survey, one of the most important things we track is the degree to which our participating schools are involved with partners they name from around the world. As a reminder, in this survey we define partnerships as one-to-one connections between a pair of institutions, whereas a reported collaboration may include one or many such partnerships. Further elaboration on this and other terms used can be found in the 2012-13 Collaborations Survey Overview Report, now available to all AACSB members in the Downloads area of DataDirect.

Interestingly, institutional partners are not always who, or where, we might expect:

Figure 1. Country-Level Collaborations Statistics

Learn About Tableau

 

While a degree of reporting bias is inevitable in surveys of this sort, I was interested to see which areas of the world had far more partnerships than others, despite hosting far fewer reporting schools overall. This is, of course, likely due to the fact that most reported partnerships are with schools outside the country of the reporting school.

Overall, only about three percent of all reported partnerships were between two institutions in the same country. Indeed, 71 percent of all the countries represented by reporting schools had no same country partnerships reported at all. Institutions in the same region are slightly more commonly paired, as about 12.3 percent of all reported partnerships were between two institutions in the same world region.

Clearly then, the data from our survey indicate that business schools are developing the overwhelming majority of their partnerships with institutions in countries and regions other than their own. One conclusion that might be drawn from this is that collaborative agreements undertaken by business schools are seen as a prime means of globalizing the scope of the management education they offer.

Reviewing Trends in U.S. Minority Business Doctoral Completions (part 2)

By Elliot Davis

As mentioned in part one, the increase in the percentage of African-Americans completing business doctoral degrees in the U.S. has been rapid. Many of these degrees are being earned at institutions that are not AACSB-accredited.

You can see in the following chart that in the mid 2000’s the gap between completions occurring at AACSB-accredited institutions and non AACSB-accredited institutions began to increase and has since grown considerably over the past decade. In fact, since 2004, there have been more completions in the U.S. each year by African-Americans at schools that lack AACSB accreditation than at AACSB-accredited schools. 

When looking at Hispanics, the same trend does seem to be occurring though to a much lesser degree. Here’s a look at that data.

Hispanics have remained closely distributed between both AACSB and non AACSB-accredited schools, but have seen more total completions at non AACSB-accredited schools consistently since 2006. While the gap has grown, the difference is still slight compared to what we have seen with African-Americans.

The sample sizes are much smaller when looking at Native-Americans, so it is harder to project this group’s trajectory than the others. Here are the completions for Native-Americans.

In recent years, there have been more Native-American business doctoral completions at non AACSB-accredited schools, but the difference has been only 2 to 3 degree completions, on average. Not much can be drawn from such a small sampling of individuals, but it is interesting to track the relationship between the two completions types.  

Diversity amongst business doctoral graduates is certainly an important focus for numerous parties, notably including The PhD Project. Pulling the start data back even further to 1985, there has been an unequivocal rise in graduates from the highlighted minority groups at AACSB-accredited schools.

A disproportionately large increase has also been observed among graduates from schools that lack AACSB accreditation in the U.S. What does this mean for diversity amongst business doctoral graduates, and their qualifications? Do you think these trends will continue to progress moving into the latter half of the decade and beyond?