AACSB Data and Research Blog

Existing Collaborations: Which Education Levels Are Most Common for Different Collaboration Types?

By Jessica Brown

AACSB International’s member schools often report various types of collaborations with other educational institutions to provide their students and faculty with additional opportunities. Some of these collaborative efforts focus on faculty exchanges or research; others help schools find ways to share resources; and some of the most visible collaborations focus on the student experience from student exchanges to more complex efforts like full dual degree programs.

As part of AACSB’s ongoing initiative to learn more about how schools collaborate to best leverage the resources available, the annual AACSB Collaboration Survey collects data on both any collaborative agreements currently in effect and those areas where schools desire to expand with new collaborations. Each existing collaboration reported may include more than one collaboration type or collaborative partner in order to capture some of the complexities of the network of collaborations at AACSB member schools.

The 2013–14 Collaborations Survey includes data for 474 schools. The data below reflect existing collaborations. For some collaboration types that involve students or degree program delivery, the education levels involved can be a key factor in describing the reach of the collaboration, so participating schools are able to select an education level where appropriate.

Percentage of Existing Collaborations by Reported Education Level

 
Note: Existing Collaborations with no specified education level were excluded from this table. Each individual collaboration contains at least two schools and may include multiple collaboration types. The education level for each activity type is independent of the education levels reported for other activity types within that collaboration agreement.

Collaboration Types Most Commonly Reported as Available at the Undergraduate Level

Three of the collaboration types listed are most common at the Undergraduate Only level: Articulation/Twinning Agreements (53.6 percent), Study Abroad/Student Exchanges (42.2 percent), and Validation Agreements (42.5 percent). If we also include any of the multilevel agreements that contain Undergraduates, the data show that 78.4 percent of the Articulation/Twinning Agreements, 79 percent of the Study Abroad/Student Exchanges, and 67.5 percent of the Validation Agreements are available to students at the Undergraduate level for the reported collaboration types.

Articulation/Twinning Agreements

Study Abroad/Student Exchange

Validation Agreement

Collaboration Types Most Commonly Reported as Available at the Master’s Level

At the Master’s Only level, Dual Degree/Multiple Degrees, and Joint Degrees are reported the most often with 59.4 percent of Dual Degree and 70.2 percent of Joint Degree Collaborations being reported as available only at the Master’s level. If the category is expanded to include any multilevel collaborative agreement that included the Master’s level, Dual Degree programs are reported as available at the Master’s level in 70.9 percent of the reported agreements, and Joint Degrees are available at this level for 76.5 percent of collaborations reported.

Dual Degree or Multiple Degree

 

Joint Degree

 

Collaborations at the Doctoral Level

While there were collaborations reported at the Doctoral level for each of these types, Doctoral was not the most common level reported for any specific type. Across all collaboration types listed as available at the Doctoral level, Joint Degree (16.7 percent), Validation Agreement (15 percent), and Franchise Agreement (14.6 percent) were the most common.

Note: The 2014–15 Collaborations Survey is now open for data entry. AACSB member schools that participate in the survey are featured within theCollaboration Concourse, and the survey overview reports and benchmarking tools for existing and desired collaborations are available as resources for all AACSB member schools.

[This content is also available in eNEWSLINE, July 2015.]

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match!

By Colin Nelson

In AACSB’s annual Collaborations Survey, we have collected a huge database of information on which of our member business schools are partnering with other institutions to enhance their programs and content delivery. My colleagues and I have discussed these partnerships in a number of previous posts here on this blog. There remains one aspect of our Collaborations Survey that we have not previously touched on, however.

A portion of the survey is devoted to “Desired Collaborations,” allowing schools to report on partnerships that they do not yet have, but would like to establish. In looking at the Desired Collaborations data, I found some interesting and (in some cases) significant differences in the types of desired collaborative activity reported by accredited versus non-accredited schools:

Table 1. Percentage of Desired Collaboration Activity Types, by AACSB Accreditation Status of Reporting School

Collaboration Activity Types	Reporting School Is:		Difference (Absolute Value)
	AACSB-Accredited	Not AACSB-Accredited
Joint Degree	8.2%	27.7%	19.5%
Faculty Activity	46.1%	63.3%	17.2%
Dual Degree (or Multiple Degree)	24.4%	41.2%	16.8%
Shared Resources	6.7%	19.8%	13.1%
Articulation/Twinning Agreement	12.4%	19.2%	6.8%
Study Abroad/Student Exchange	79.1%	83.6%	4.5%
Non-Degree/Executive Education	13.3%	16.4%	3.1%
Franchise Agreement	0.4%	2.3%	1.9%
Validation Agreement	3.0%	4.0%	1.0%
Other	7.2%	6.8%	0.4%
Total Number of Desired Collaborations Reported	540	177
Total Reporting Schools	143	65

Note: Desired collaborations reported with multiple types are counted for each applicable type, and so the percentages do not sum to 100 percent for each type of reporting school. Source: AACSB Collaborations Survey (2013-14).

As you can see, some activity types are definitely more desirable than others regardless of whether the reporting schools are accredited (e.g., Study Abroad/Student Exchange and Faculty Activity), but AACSB accreditation status makes a big difference in many cases as well. The most extreme example of this was in the desire for new Joint Degree programs, which were selected as a desired activity in over a quarter of all desired collaborations reported by non-accredited schools, while less than nine percent of the desired collaborations reported by accredited schools included this activity type.

In fact, in every activity category besides “Other”, non-accredited respondents were more likely to indicate that they wished to pursue new partnerships involving that activity type. This was true despite the fact that non-accredited respondents reported less than a quarter of the total desired collaborations entered into the survey. Clearly then, non-accredited schools were more likely than their accredited counterparts to select a larger number of activity types per desired collaboration. This implies that accredited respondents tend to be more targeted in the types of activities they wish to pursue in their future collaborations.

One possible explanation for this greater specificity is that AACSB-accredited schools have already established collaborative partnerships to a much greater extent. Indeed, non-accredited respondents reported a similar proportion of the total partnerships entered in the “Existing Collaborations” portion of the survey as they did of the “Desired Collaborations” portion.

The practical use of desired collaborations data to our membership is obvious. Anyone at an AACSB member school that has a DataDirect user account can log in to our DataDirect system and search out schools that have indicated a desire to partner with schools in their region, with schools interested in the same types of partnership activities, and sometimes even with them, specifically, if the school reporting the desired collaboration names specific desired partners (which was the case for 48.1 percent of all desired collaborations reported in the 2013-14 survey).

At our annual International Conference and Meeting (ICAM) for 2015, however, we announced a new way our membership can access and use these data to help find collaborative partners: the Collaboration Concourse, a new feature in the AACSB Exchange. Now, anyone attached to one of our member schools, whether they have a user account for DataDirect or not, can access the Collaboration Concourse on the Exchange, and search for schools that want to partner with schools like their own!

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

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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.

Who Goes Where to Study Abroad? (Part II, Levels)

By Colin Nelson

As I mentioned in my last post, this time I will be discussing the data from AACSB’s Collaborations Survey on student exchanges reported by our member schools, in the context of the educational level of the students who choose to study abroad. As before, in this context, studying abroad refers to a year or semester spent abroad at a school other than the one at which the student is actually enrolled, rather than being an "internationally mobile student," who undertakes an entire degree program in a country other than their home.

Figure 1. Outbound Exchange Students from Reporting Schools, by Level

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Source: AACSB Collaborations Survey 2011-12.

Something I find interesting about the numbers of exchange students from the reporting schools is the extreme lopsidedness in the proportion of undergraduate vs. graduate students from schools in Northern America. Nearly 83 percent of outbound exchange students from Northern American reporting schools were undergraduates. By contrast, undergraduates constituted only about 56 percent of the total number of outbound exchange students from reporting schools in the regions with the next highest percentage, namely Asia and Oceania. Indeed, the proportion of undergraduates may be even lower in Oceania (and Europe) given the sizeable number of exchange students from those regions whose level was not reported.

Figure 2. Inbound Exchange Students Hosted at Reporting Schools, by Level 

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Source: AACSB Collaborations Survey 2011-12.

Admittedly, given the limited data from Africa and Oceania, as well as the fact that the educational level of the majority of hosted students in the latter was not reported, it's difficult to make any valid statements about those regions. Hopefully, greater participation in the Collaborations Survey in future years from those regions will enable us to do that.

Among the regions with better representation, however, once again Northern American reporting schools appear to have much more focus on exchange students at the undergraduate level than do reporting schools from anywhere else. So why is it that business students from Northern American schools appear to study abroad as undergraduates so much more frequently than as graduate students? It is true that Study Abroad/Student Exchange partnership agreements reported by Northern American schools were nearly twice as likely to include an undergraduate component as to include a master's component. However, the same was true of those reported by Asian schools. Clearly then, while the predilection for that type of agreement may have something to do with the uneven proportions we've observed, it is not the only factor.

Who Goes Where to Study Abroad? (Part I, Regions)

By Colin Nelson

In AACSB’s Collaborations Survey, we collect information on many different types of partnerships and activities that our members pursue with partner institutions around the world. An increasingly large number of schools have reported such activity over the years, and the sheer number of collaborations between them has grown by leaps and bounds. One thing that is more difficult to track, however, is the amount of use that a given partnership agreement sees.

By far the most commonly reported type of collaboration is Study Abroad/Student Exchange, which is the sole activity type of 63.7% of all reported collaborations (and one of multiple types involved in another 23.6% of all reported collaborations). Fortunately, the survey does capture the number of students a reporting school sends and receives in a given survey year, by region and by level, so we can, at least to a degree, judge the level of intensity for this type of activity:

Figure 1. Regions Visited by Students of Reporting Schools

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Source: AACSB Collaborations Survey 2011-12.

Figure 2. Home Regions of Students Hosted by Reporting Schools

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Source: AACSB Collaborations Survey 2011-12.

Clearly, schools in Europe are the most common study abroad destination for students of AACSB members from any region (save Africa, and that not by much). Likewise, by and large AACSB members host more students from Europe than anywhere else (where the home region is specified). The exceptions to this observation are Asia, where intra-regional mobility is more common, and Africa, where again the lack of more than a single reporting school likely skews the results. Please note as well that in this context, studying abroad refers to a year or semester abroad at a school other than the one at which the student is actually enrolled, rather than being an "internationally mobile student," who undertakes an entire degree program in a country other than their home.

These observations make sense for two reasons. First, the European community has long had transnational education programs in place such as Alfa, Edulink, Erasmus Mundus, and Tempus, which help to enable such interactions between schools in various world regions. As a result, European students are more likely than those of any other region to engage in study abroad.

Secondly, over half of all reported Study Abroad/Student Exchange partnerships were reported by European schools:

Table 1. Regional Percentages of Total Reported Study Abroad/Student Exchange Partnerships

Region	Percent of Total
Africa	0.3%
Asia	14.1%
Europe	51.0%
Latin America and the Caribbean	5.1%
Northern America	26.0%
Oceania	3.6%

Source: AACSB Collaborations Survey 2011-12. May not sum to 100% due to rounding.

Watch for my next post, where I'll talk about educational levels in this context.

 

Experiential Invention in the Undergraduate Curricula

By Elliot Davis

Recently, I have been assisting with preliminary research involved in the preparation for an event in April: the Redesigning Undergraduate Curriculum Symposium (RUC). Much like its predecessor, Redesigning the MBA: A Curriculum Development Symposium, RUC aims to provide its participants with an understanding of the changing undergraduate business degree landscape and the ensuing challenges and opportunities, along with implementation strategies and best practices. Throughout our initial research phase, I was struck by the inventiveness of many of the experiential programs and centers we had the opportunity to learn about.  

The experiential programs we learned about can be categorized into several distinctive buckets, including service learning, cultural immersion, business planning/new venture creation, simulation, and internship/live case. A small sampling of these programs is listed in the table below. The majority of these experiential courses aim to equip students with the skills that are increasingly becoming an important factor in the work place. Their goal: to make their graduates even more competitive in the job market, and provide opportunities to refine critical skills such as leadership, communication, thinking and reasoning skills, and global awareness.

Business Plan/ New Venture Creation	Rady School of Management's Innovation to Market James Madison University's COB 300 Babson's Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship World Bachelor in Business (WBB)
Simulation	Tepper School of Business' Management Game Haas School of Business' Leading Strategy and Implementation
Service Learning	Wharton's Management 100 Haas School of Business' Leading Strategy and Implementation
Cultural Immersion	Villanova University's Global Citizens Program Yonsei University's Creative Leadership Curriculum
Internship/Live Case	Trulaske College of Business' BA 4500 Yonsei University's Creative Leadership Curriculum

Often, undergraduate programs combine experiences in two or more categories, as is the case at the University of California, Berkley's Haas School of Business, which embraces both simulation and service learning in its undergraduate curriculum. The Center for Young Entrepreneurs at Haas (YEAH) coordinates an integrative capstone experience for seniors called Leading Strategy and Implementation. This experience has two distinctly different yet interconnected components. Students first engage in a simulation where they are teamed into an account management group. Students make a series of business decisions and submit a report on their proceedings to the faculty. Subsequently, a selection of these students take the follow-up course, where they redo the simulation but as the CEO of their team. The wrinkle? Their team is made up of five local, at-risk high school students from the Bay area. The high school students make their own decisions under the supervision of the facilitating Haas undergraduate, who acts as both boss and mentor. This experience is designed to serve the community while providing hands-on leadership and team building opportunities for the participating Haas senior.

Yonsei University's Creative Leadership Curriculum focuses on a series of six programs designed to instill students with the school's three core values: creativity, global perspective, and integrity. Through this curriculum, Yonsei delivers a blend of cultural immersion and live case to its students through uGET (undergraduate Global Experience Team-project). uGET involves significant field work with students receiving sponsorships from overseas companies. The students travel to their designated company overseas for four to eight weeks, perform research and analysis, and then complete a report and presentation for their sponsoring company.

One other particularly unique program which adopts the cultural immersion category for experiential learning, still in its infancy but with very ambitious goals, involves a partnership between three universities (The University of Southern California, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Bocconi University in Italy) where students will study on at least three different continents and subsequently earn three bachelor's degrees, one from each of the participating institutions. This program, called the World Bachelor in Business (WBB), will admit its first cohort in Fall 2013. The WBB's worldwide approach aims to broaden its students’ global awareness through immersion in three divergent cultures.

The internship experience still remains one of the fundamental ways for undergraduates to gain real-world experience before graduating into the work force. Many schools noted that their students continue to engage in internship programs to supplement their academic experience. In particular, the Trulaske College of Business' BA 4500 requires an internship experience. BA 4500 is the final component in the college's Professional Development Program (PDP), a requisite for graduation. The PDP offers seminars from top level executives, skill-building workshops, and a professional development course focused on business communication and presentation.

As evidenced, the variety in undergraduate experiential coursework abounds, fueling our desire for rewarding dialogue over the future of the undergraduate curriculum. RUC aims to explore this topic of experiential learning, including the dissection of several innovative programs, but will also encapsulate a much wider range of emerging undergraduate curricular trends, including topics such as the development of critical thinking skills, the integration of the business disciplines, and various pedagogical advancements. 

Does AACSB Accreditation Matter When Forming Collaborations?

By Colin Nelson

Recently, I’ve been doing some deeper analysis of the data from AACSB’s most recent Collaborations Survey in support of our upcoming Management Education Forum on Developing High-Impact Collaborations. While doing so, I noticed that there were significant differences between AACSB-accredited reporting schools and reporting schools without AACSB accreditation in the proportion of partnerships with other schools by accreditation status.

Figure 1. Reported Partnerships by AACSB Accreditation Status

Source: AACSB International Collaborations Survey 2010-11. Note: This chart does not account for the 45 reported partnerships with non-business academic units or non-educational institutions, for whom accreditation is not applicable.

As a reminder, partnerships in the context of our survey denote a one-to-one relationship between two institutions involved in a collaboration. A reporting school can have one or many partnerships within a single given collaboration.

As you can see, nearly 45% of all partnerships reported by AACSB-accredited schools were with other AACSB-accredited schools. By contrast, less than a quarter of the partnerships reported by schools without AACSB accreditation were with AACSB-accredited schools.

There are a number of different reasons why this difference might exist. AACSB-accredited schools may desire (or simply have the ability) to exercise greater discrimination in their choices of whom to collaborate with. After all, if your partner is also accredited, there is less need to be concerned about whether they can deliver the same level of quality on their part of any collaborative arrangement, so allying with another accredited school may be more attractive as a result.

It is also worth noting that this pattern of partner selection does not necessarily apply universally when you break the total number of partnerships down by the different types of activity we track:

Table 1. Percentage of Reported Partnerships, by Activity Type and Partner Accreditation Status

Activity Type	Accredited Reporting Schools		Non-accredited Reporting Schools
	Accredited Partner	Non-accredited Partner	Accredited Partner	Non-accredited Partner
Articulation/ Twinning Agreement	15.8%	84.2%	25.0%	75.0%
Dual Degree (or Multiple Degree)	36.5%	63.5%	33.0%	67.0%
Faculty Activity	45.2%	54.8%	17.4%	82.6%
Franchise Agreement	14.3%	85.7%	0.0%	100%
Joint Degree	51.0%	49.0%	17.7%	82.3%
Non-Degree/ Executive Education	54.6%	45.4%	35.7%	64.3%
Shared Resources	53.9%	46.1%	32.5%	67.5%
Study Abroad/ Student Exchange	45.5%	54.5%	24.1%	75.9%
Validation Agreement	0.0%	100%	33.3%	66.7%
Other	47.0%	53.0%	15.3%	84.7%

Source: AACSB International Collaborations Survey 2010-11. Note: This table does not account for the 45 reported partnerships with non-business academic units or non-educational institutions, for whom accreditation is not applicable.

More than 80% of all partnerships reported by AACSB-accredited schools involving Articulation/Twinning, Franchise, and Validation Agreements are with partners that do not have AACSB accreditation. This makes sense, of course, because accredited schools are much less likely to have need of AACSB-accredited partners for these types of collaborative activities. On the other hand, when it comes to partnerships involving Joint Degrees, Non-Degree/Executive Education, and Shared Resources, AACSB-accredited schools show a clear preference for partners who are likewise AACSB-accredited.

Business Schools and International Branch Campuses

By Colin Nelson*

Globalization is all the rage in higher education these days. Among the many different means by which higher education institutions may seek to broaden their global footprint, however, none is as attention-getting, resource-intensive, or demonstrative of commitment to globalization as the establishment of an international branch campus (IBC).

According to the latest report from the Observatory for Borderless Higher Education (OBHE), the number of IBCs around the world continues to grow, though the pace of institutions establishing IBCs has slowed somewhat from where it was earlier this century. OBHE has identified 200 IBCs worldwide as of the end of 2011, with at least 37 more under development.

Business schools in particular have been leaders in the field of the globalization of higher education, since the practice of management has historically been an internationalized enterprise, and only continues to grow more so. Therefore, it stands to reason that business schools would also be at the forefront of the IBC trend. One of the questions asked of AACSB member schools who participate in the Collaborations Survey is whether or not their school maintains a campus in one or more of the major world regions outside their home region:

Table 1. International Branch Campuses of AACSB Member Schools

Reporting Schools:			Number with Presence in:
Primary Campus Regions	Total Reporting Schools	Reported Multiple Campuses	Africa	Asia	Europe	Latin America and Caribbean	Northern America	Oceania
Eastern Asia	19	1	1	-	0	0	0	0
Western Asia: Middle East	5	2	1	-	2	1	2	2
South-Eastern Asia	7	0	0	-	0	0	0	0
Southern Asia	5	0	0	-	0	0	0	0
Eastern Europe	6	0	0	0	-	0	0	0
Middle Europe	25	3	1	2	-	1	0	0
Northern Europe	20	6	1	6	-	0	0	0
Southern Europe	5	0	0	0	-	0	0	0
Australia and New Zealand	8	1	0	1	0	0	0	-
Central America	3	1	0	1	1	-	1	0
Northern America	193	34	2	18	27	10	-	4
South America	12	1	0	0	0	-	1	0

Source:AACSB Collaborations Survey 2010-11. Note: This chart is corrected for mistakes in reporting, and null responses were considered negative. AACSB's World Region Classification System, which is based on that of the United Nations, explicitly makes no official endorsements regarding the countries and territories listed, either geographically or politically.

Out of the 309 AACSB member schools that reported data on the latest iteration of the survey, 49 reported at least one campus outside their home region. Of these, 15 reported having a campus in multiple regions outside their home region. Taking these data in conjunction with those of the OBHE, AACSB member schools account for at least 43% of all currently extant IBCs in the world!

This percentage is likely even higher, given that only 309 AACSB members (out of our current total of 1271), have so far reported their data to the Collaborations Survey. A number of those who have not are known to have one or more IBCs.

It is important to note, however, that establishing IBCs is not necessarily the best approach to embracing globalization. There are a whole host of factors to be considered before establishing, and while operating, an IBC, in order to ensure that a school is taking into account what is best for its stakeholders, particularly with regard to maintaining equivalent quality. As we here at AACSB took pains to point out in the case studies within our recent report, Globalization of Management Education,  no one approach to addressing the issues surrounding globalization is best (or even feasible) for all schools.

Nevertheless, with more and more of our members beginning to establish IBCs of their own, maintaining quality management education across international campus networks will necessarily become increasingly important for AACSB.

*Edited May 3, 2012: An earlier version of this post gave the total number of business schools contributing data to the Collaborations Survey as 308, rather than the accurate total of 309.

Opportunities for Internationalization

By Colin Nelson

In an increasingly interconnected world, many business schools have come to the realization that they cannot effectively train the managers and business leaders of the future without providing opportunities for their students (and by extension, their faculty and staff) to engage in international activities, which contribute to their understanding of that world. In AACSB’s annual Collaborations Survey, responding schools can report on a variety of such opportunities that they make available to students, faculty, and/or staff:

Figure 1. Opportunities for Internationalization in Use at Business Schools

Source: AACSB Collaborations Survey (2010-11).

Among the 308 total schools that contributed data to the latest iteration of the Collaborations Survey, strong majorities affirm offering all ten of the internationalization opportunities asked about in the survey, which I see as a positive indication that business schools are taking seriously the need to prepare their students for business leadership in a globalized world. Still, it is evident that some means are more broadly considered useful than others to this endeavor.

For example, approximately 89% of respondents reported offering short-term trips abroad for academic credit, while only 59% reported offering them in a non-credit capacity. Clearly then, the business schools who responded to the survey more strongly favor giving credit for the educational experience inherent in short-term trips abroad.

Study abroad opportunities for students were easily the most popular of the ten types, with 95% of respondents reporting that such opportunities were available at their school. This makes sense, given that such opportunities are relatively easy to arrange and execute compared to other types. Indeed, study abroad/student exchange was an element of 88% of the 5,513 total reported collaborative agreements in the survey, and the sole element of nearly 66% of all reported collaborations.

Internships abroad and (seemingly despite the attention that such programs typically receive) joint/dual degree programs were among the least commonly reported opportunities in the survey, with 72% and 62% of respondents affirming their use, respectively. This, too, makes sense, given that these types of international opportunities require much more in the way of resources, logistics, and long-term commitment than many of the others above.

Nevertheless, this represents a rise of nearly 5% (in the case of internships) and 7% (in the case of joint/dual degree programs) from the results of the 2009-10 Collaborations Survey. Other evidence also suggests that growth in collaborative degree programs may be a trend worth watching.