AACSB Data and Research Blog

Preliminary Results From the 2017–18 Business School Questionnaire

By Jeanine Romano

Data collection for the 2017–18 AASCB Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) and BSQ Finances Module officially closed in early June. We have had record participation this year, with 972 of our member schools submitting a BSQ and 587 submitting a BSQ Finances Module

Since our June closing date, AACSB’s Business Education Intelligence (BEI) team has been reviewing each survey to help ensure that schools are submitting valid, reliable, and complete data. Data integrity is our top priority, so even though we do have validation processing rules programmed into the survey submission system, we also read through each submitted survey and assist schools when necessary. This may seem like a rather arduous process to some but it will lead to a data set that our members can be confident is as accurate as possible and truly germane to their benchmarking and peer analysis.

So far we have validated and accepted 426 BSQs and anticipate releasing the rest of the data by the end of September. As a benefit of participating, all member schools that submitted the surveys will have access to the custom report tools available in DataDirect

Here’s what can we tell you based on data from the 426 surveys we have accepted so far:

• A little less than half of these schools reported that their undergraduate students are mostly residential, whereas almost two-thirds of all graduate students are commuters.
• Close to 60 percent of the schools reported that they have updated their strategic plans within the last 18 months.
• Almost half of respondents indicated that teaching was their sole highest priority, whereas about 12 percent indicated that intellectual contribution was their sole highest priority.
• The median operating budget for these schools was over 11 million USD, but the average was a little less than 22 million USD.
• About 75 percent of these schools indicated that they offered at least one bachelor’s degree in accounting. A little less than this percentage also reported that they offered a specialized master’s degree in accounting.
• This year we introduced data analytics into our field/discipline category. Less than 2 percent of reporting schools indicated that they offered a bachelor’s degree in this area of study, and about 8 percent indicated that they offered a specialized master’s degree in the discipline.
• Only 20 percent of all doctoral degrees were in the field of accounting, but 40 percent were in the field of management.
• Nearly 82 percent of schools indicated that they offered at least one MBA program.
• Almost twice as many students on average at these schools are enrolled in part-time programs than in full-time programs.

But these are just preliminary results of only 426 schools. When we have finished reviewing and accepting all of our schools’ surveys, will we see something different? What about undergraduate enrollments, faculty, staff, and admissions? What are the differences in these figures based on location, mission, size, and other factors? And how are schools’ program portfolios, enrollments, staffing structures, and financial situations changing

In the coming months you will see some blog posts on the complete set of data, where we’ll be diving into questions such as: What is the state of data analytics as program of study? Where are the trends in online MBA? How do salary versus non-salary expenditures vary depending on what a school emphasizes? Are the percentages of women in faculty roles increasing?—to name just a few

AACSB strives to be widely recognized as the primary source for data and analysis on business education globally. We look forward to receiving the submissions for all schools and being able to provide our members with an even more accurate picture of the current state of business schools.

Employment Trends of Business School Graduates (Part I): Post-Graduation Employment Rates

By Colin Nelson

Among the most important objectives that business schools ultimately have is to ensure that their students prepared for the careers they will pursue post-graduation. One aspect of the data AACSB International collects from schools that participate in the Employment Module of our annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) measures how successful their graduates are in obtaining employment after earning their degrees.

Figure 1. Business Graduates Reporting Job Offer Acceptance

Note: Data come from 137 AACSB member schools that completed the AACSB data entry sections of the BSQ Employment Module in the last three years.

Of particular interest is the difference between the trends in employment rates and the numbers of graduates at each level. For example, among this set of participating schools, there was a decline in the overall number of graduates over the past three years for both general business master’s and doctoral programs, of approximately 8 percent and 14 percent, respectively. In both cases, the proportion of total graduates attaining employment within three months of graduation rose by a couple of percentage points.

In contrast, both undergraduate and specialized master’s programs saw a rise in their overall number of graduates by approximately 21 percent, while the employment rate held steady for undergraduate degree earners and declined by nearly 7 percent for specialized master’s graduates. This discrepancy may indicate that the job market is able to absorb an increased number of business degree graduates at the undergraduate level. To a lesser extent, this is also true at the specialized master’s level, given that the decline in employment rate for these graduates is far less than the increase in their numbers.

Look out for the second part of this series, in which we discuss trends in the industries in which MBA graduates find employment!

Factors Affecting School Size Categories (Part II)—Or, What Makes A School Large, Small, or Somewhere in Between?

By Colin Nelson

As promised in my last post, we have continued exploring potential alternate parameters for categorizing schools according to size. This post explores the impact on the number of schools classified as small, medium and large—if the parameters are changed from the standard parameters based on counts of full-time faculty to the various alternate parameters mentioned in Part I. We look at that impact at subsets of AACSB member schools offering different combinations of degree levels.

Figure 1. Net Change in Size Categories, Standard vs. Alternate Parameters by Degree Program Levels Offered

 

Some of the considered alternative size parameters cause the numbers of small, medium and large schools to differ more significantly from our standard classification scheme than others do. For example, when using the alternate parameters of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Faculty Counts or Total Enrollment Counts, in each case the vast majority of schools stay in the same size category as when defined by the current standard Full-Time (FT) Faculty parameters. Schools that do change category almost inevitably move down the size scale, particularly schools that offer both undergraduate- and graduate-level programs. Only among schools that solely offer undergraduate programs does the change in size category potentially go in either direction.

By contrast, when we apply alternate parameters based on student/faculty ratios, the numbers of schools that change size category from the standard parameters are far greater, comprising anywhere between 20 to 40 percent of the schools in each group. The net changes for both types of student/faculty ratios follow the same general pattern, but that pattern is much less uniform than that of the alternate parameters of FTE Faculty and for Total Enrollment.

Schools with doctoral programs, for example, appear much more likely to move down in size category when using either Student/FT Faculty or Student/FTE Faculty Ratios. In particular, application of the Student/FT Faculty Ratio results in over 34 percent of schools that offer doctoral programs moving down in size category, whereas nearly 19 percent of all schools without doctoral programs move up in size category.

When selecting peer schools for benchmarking in DataDirect based on school size, it is important to keep factors such as these in mind. What other characteristics do you think might influence the size category under these alternate parameters?

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.

The Effect (Or Not) of Institutional Control on Starting Salaries

By Colin Nelson

By far one of the most popular queries we here at AACSB receive is regarding information about how a degree from an AACSB-accredited school contributes to the career of those who receive it. As we prepare to release the data from the 2015-16 iteration of the AACSB BSQ Employment Module survey, I thought I might treat our readers to a preview of the data that can help to shed light on that question.

For those who may be unfamiliar with the survey, on it we collect information about the starting salaries for graduates at every level. To frame the context of what we collect, it is important to understand that all starting salaries reported are only for those graduates who were seeking employment (i.e., not already employed during their course of study, continuing their education afterward, etc.). Moreover, they are only those that pertain to employment seekers who received and accepted job offers either at the time of graduation, or within three months. In this way, we can be sure that the salaries reported were received on the basis of the degree earned.

Figure 1. Average of Lowest and Highest Reported Base Starting Salary, by Institutional Control and Degree Level

Source: 2015-16 AACSB BSQ Employment Module. Note: All data are from AACSB-accredited schools, and N=number of schools reporting salary data.

I was surprised to note that, with a few exceptions, there was relatively little difference between the average starting salaries reported by public versus private schools, at both the high and low ends of the spectrum. It was mainly at the doctoral level that institutional control appeared to make any significant difference, and it is entirely probable that this is at least partially an effect of the small sample size of schools reporting at that level.

The only other place where there was any significant difference was at the high end of the starting salaries for graduates of generalist business master’s programs. Given how little real effect institutional control appears to have as a differentiating factor for starting salaries at other levels, however, I suspect that there are other factors at work. Look for my next post, in which I will explore some of them.

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!

Changing Program Composition

By Elliot Davis

If you’ve been tapped into the news regarding higher education and business schools lately, you may be concerned by some of the words being used to describe the current landscape. There have been cries of enormous upheavals occurring at business schools, describing these changing times as any one of a slew of natural disasters, like the higher education tsunami, or earthquake, or avalanche. With this whirlwind landscape in a constant state of flux, how have business schools adapted their program offerings to the changing environment?

Using a controlled set of AACSB Accredited schools that responded to the Business School Questionnaire over the past five years, the following chart shows the percentage gains and declines in program offerings by discipline across all educational levels. 

Source: AACSB Business School Questionnaire, 2008-2009 to 2012-2013. Controlled set of AACSB Accredited Schools Reporting in all 5 Years. N = 493. 

I was immediately struck by the large falloff in e-business and e-commerce programs. This program has seen a whopping 46.81 percent dip over the five year time frame. On the flip side, business ethics including corporate social responsibility has seen a 37.50 percent increase over that same period.

The following are the programs that have seen the greatest increases and decreases over this time frame:

To drill down further, the following dashboard shares more details by displaying the changes broken down by educational level and the number of programs being reported.

Learn About Tableau

Is what we are seeing occur here in business school programming reflective of the times? When we look at the next five years’ worth of data, what programs will have seen the largest growth and largest decline?

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?

Reviewing Trends in U.S. Minority Business Doctoral Completions (part 1)

By Elliot Davis

Are U.S. business PhD programs increasing the proportion of minority graduates? That was a question posed to me recently and explored in the charts below. No doubt the findings will be of interest to supporters of and participants in The PhD Project, an innovative program established by the KPMG foundation in 1994 with the mission to increase the proportion of PhD graduates who are considered African-American, Hispanic-American, and Native-American. AACSB, along with several other organizations, has been a steadfast supporter of The PhD Project and its goal to strengthen management education by increasing the diversity of qualified faculty for business schools.

Data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) provided by the National Center for Education Statistics helps to shed light on trends with respect to the business doctoral completions for these groups over the past two decades – from 1994 (the start of The PhD Project) to 2012 (the most recent available data set).

The following graph illustrates completions, as a percentage of total completions, for the aforementioned minority groups from 1994 to 2012, at all schools in the United States (including non AACSB-accredited schools). 

Linear trendlines are provided to offer a better sense of the overall trends occurring. African-Americans have seen the greatest percentage increase, up to 13.45% (2012) from 2.48% (1994). Hispanics have seen positive growth (though slight) and Native-Americans have seen relatively little change.

When narrowing the completions to only those at AACSB-accredited schools (using the current list of AACSB-accredited schools), we see some stark differences. 

The slope of the trendline for African-Americans at U.S. AACSB-accredited schools is far less steep than at all U.S. schools. A potential reason for this difference can likely be accounted for (in part) by the increase in PhD accessibility through the rise of certain non AACSB-accredited schools, such as University of Phoenix, Walden University, Argosy University, and Capella University.

There are certainly many other factors that have gone into these changing trendlines, including socio-economic, cultural, and geographic differences. Tracking this data moving forward will be of particular interest to organizations such as The PhD Project and AACSB International. What do you think about this? Are these trends positive for management education and for workplace diversity?

In an upcoming blog post, I will focus in on the specific minority groupings and provide more targeted data regarding business doctoral completions attributed to each.