AACSB Data and Research Blog

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.

Emerging Trends in MOOC Delivery of Business Education

By Colin Nelson

In past posts, I have touched on the subject of business school activity in the realm of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which over the short period of time I looked at them previously had begun to grow rapidly. Today, however, there is a sea change in both the quantity and types of institutions offering MOOCs in the business education space, in the types of instructors teaching them, and, especially, in the types of courses being offered.

As in my previous posts, I examined many of the available MOOC providers that offer courses in the management education space, including Coursera, edX, Udacity, Futurelearn, the Canvas Network, and the Academic Financial Trading Platform (AFTP). Most of these providers have either maintained or grown their offerings since last I looked in on this topic[1]:

Figure 1. Business MOOCs by Platform and AACSB Accreditation Status of Provider Institutions, as of 6/30/2015

Note: The numbers on the graph bars indicate the actual absolute numbers of business-related MOOCs offered by the given provider type.

 

Figure 2. Institutions Offering Business MOOCs by Platform and AACSB Accreditation Status, as of 6/30/2015

Note: The numbers on the graph bars indicate the actual absolute numbers of provider institutions of the given type.

As you can see, the majority of MOOCs are still run by universities or other tertiary-level educational institutions, but a growing number of business-related MOOCs are being offered by institutions for whom academics are a less central focus. Evidence for this trend exists even at the most established MOOC platforms. For example, some of the business-related MOOCs available on the edX platform are delivered by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), while Coursera hosts a MOOC delivered by economists from the World Bank Group.

Additionally, more and more of the business-related MOOCs I looked at are being taught by faculty from outside the business school, or by professionals such as accountants or economists, either in tandem with business school faculty or on their own. Both of the MOOCs offered on edX by Harvard Business School are co-taught with faculty from other departments, while on Coursera, only three out of 15 business-related MOOCs of the University of California, Irvine, are taught by a faculty member from the Merage School (the remainder are taught by UCI-Extension faculty).

Table 1. Proportion of Non-Business School Instructors of Business-Related MOOCs, by Platform, as of 6/30/2015

MOOC Platform	Total Number of Instructors Involved in Business MOOCs	Percentage from Outside Business Schools
Coursera	171	18.7%
edX	138	64.5%
Futurelearn	21	14.3%
AFTP	6	0.0%

Perhaps the most important development, however, is the increasing appearance of MOOC series that can be pursued for relatively low-cost credentialing options (at least when compared to the cost of a degree). EdX, for example, offers XSeries Certificates for completing a series of three to five related MOOCs, such as the Supply Chain Management XSeries of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Coursera likewise offers Specialization Certificates for completing short sequences of four to nine related MOOCs, usually including a capstone project, such as the Business Foundations Specialization of the Wharton School. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is now taking this evolution one step further, announcing the iMBA program, which will allow students to compile multiple Coursera Specialization Certificates into a full MBA degree, presumably at a fraction of the typical cost.

Finally, newer platforms have begun to expand various free or low-cost MOOC offerings available in the management education space, such as Silicon Valley’s NovoEd, India-based EduKart, France Université Numérique (FUN), and Chinese-language platforms ewant and xuetangX. Some business schools are experimenting with independent offerings as well. Stanford Graduate School of Business offers many individual business MOOCs and full certificate programs, other than the ones it runs through Coursera and NovoEd, on iTunesU and on its own proprietary platform (Stanford OpenEdX). Harvard Business School also runs its HBX program independently of the edX platform that Harvard University co-founded with MIT.

It seems clear that business education MOOCs are here to stay, but whether they will become a widely accepted part of higher educational credentialing remains to be seen.

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[1] Changes to the web format of the Canvas Network catalog of MOOCs since I last looked in on this topic have made it virtually impossible to determine who teaches the business-related courses offered via that platform or the total number of them; hence they are not considered further here. Udacity offers exactly one business-related MOOC in entrepreneurship, taught by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank (no academic affiliation).

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!

A B-School Dean Lingua Franca?

By Elliot Davis

In 2011, my colleague Juliane Iannarelli shared that in years past, the language of instruction at many business schools may have been taken for granted, but that in today’s global higher education and business environment, it has become a strategic dimension of program design and delivery.

In AACSB’s 2013-2014 Business School Questionnaire, 85.6 percent of 750 participating schools reported that the primary language of instruction at their institution was English. When excluding several English-speaking countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, that percentage drops considerably to 37.8 percent. However, 57.9 percent of these schools do offer instruction in a secondary language, and in 81 percent of the schools offering a second language, English is the language spoken.

It is clear that English is spoken widely at business schools around the world. If not used as the primary language for instruction, it is often spoken as a secondary language. But what of the leaders of these business schools? What languages do they speak, and do their languages align closely with the primary language of instruction at the business schools themselves?

The results of AACSB’s 2014-2015 Deans Survey are in, and AACSB staff have been taking a closer look at the overall profile of the business school dean in recent weeks. The 2014-2015 Deans Survey, conducted triennially with the cooperation and assistance of AACSB member institutions and their staff, received participation from 650 business school deans and interim deans, with 64 nationalities represented.

As could be expected based on the overall profile of the business schools themselves, the most common fluently spoken language of the responding deans was English, with 90.2 percent of deans reporting fluency. Interestingly, though, 48 percent of the responding deans did report speaking more than one language fluently.

Table 1. Number of Languages Spoken Fluently By Deans

Number of Languages	Percent (n=357)
One	52.4%
Two	35.3%
Three	10.4%
Four	1.4%
Five or more	0.6%

Source: AACSB 2014-2015 Deans Survey

The below visual shows a breakdown of the commonality of English fluency of business school deans.

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You can access the display on its own page for ease of viewing by clicking here.

As evidenced by the world region breakdown provided on the display, English is spoken frequently in all regions. This result aligns closely with the usage of English as a primary or secondary language of instruction for the business schools themselves. 

While English is certainly commonly spoken by business school deans, other languages that were identified as commonly spoken among the responding deans include French (8.7 percent), Spanish (7.7 percent), Hindi (5.3 percent), and Mandarin Chinese (5.0 percent).

If you found this data interesting and would like to learn more about business school deans or issues related to management education, you can follow along with BizEd’s special coverage of the AACSB 2015 Deans Conference currently unfolding in San Diego.

Our Reach

By Colin Nelson

The 2014 International Conference and Annual Meeting (ICAM) convened last month in Singapore, and represented AACSB International’s first foray into hosting our flagship annual conference in Asia. That ICAM was hosted there so successfully is significant, as it is a recognition of the changing dynamic within AACSB’s global membership; as of this writing, 51.5 percent of our membership is now based outside AACSB’s birthplace in the United States. In fact, it was around this time last year that AACSB’s non-U.S. members first crossed the majority threshold.

The breadth of AACSB’s global reach is often a topic of discussion, as is the organization’s penetration in various countries or regions. I recently created a tool on our new website, regularly updated, which hopefully should be of great use for those curious about AACSB’s global reach: 

http://www.aacsb.edu/about/our-reach/

This visualization now contains tabs that share data on both member and accredited member percentages in each country or territory in which AACSB currently has a presence, based upon our estimated number of total schools offering business degrees in each. (If you aren’t familiar with our visualization software, Tableau, by hovering your mouse over each country/territory, you can see a number of data points, including the number of member schools, accredited member schools, our current estimated total of schools offering business degree programs, etc.)

Also included is our official methodology for counting such schools, which I felt was important to include so that everyone can easily understand how we arrive at these estimations. The primary reason we use this particular methodology is that it allows us to quantify the breadth of the degree-based management education marketplace on a per country/territory basis, in a comparable and useful fashion. Using this methodology, for example, we are able to accurately declare that only about 4.4 percent of all institutions offering business degree programs worldwide currently hold AACSB accreditation. This cannot be said about the number of “business schools”, for the simple reason that there is no universally accepted definition of what precisely constitutes a “business school”, and thus no way to estimate that number.

As you can see, at this writing about 80 percent of our members, and 95 percent of AACSB-accredited schools, are located in countries that are currently classified as High-income economies by the World Bank. By contrast, we estimate that a far smaller percentage of all institutions offering business degrees worldwide are based in such countries:

Figure 1. Percentage of Estimated Schools Offering Business Degrees by World Bank Economic Category

AACSB’s push to expand our reach into previously untapped or underrepresented marketplaces is one of the most important of our nearly 100-year history. As AACSB reaches out to embrace management education and its providers in the developing world, I think we will end up being much more true to our mission.

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.

Significant Strides in Specialized Master’s Enrollment

By Hanna McLeod

In the past few years the AACSB research and knowledge services team has been noticing interesting trends in enrollment at the graduate level, specifically decreasing numbers for MBA programs and greater interest for Specialized Master’s programs. There are various opinions and speculations on what is behind this trend – changing employer and student interest for more focused or specialized knowledge; programs offering shorter time to degree; oversaturation of a particular market; etc. But how significant have the enrollment changes for these two degree program types really been in the past five years? Take a look below:

MBA vs. Specialized MA Enrollment Change at AACSB-Accredited Schools, 2008-09 to 2012-13*
	MBA Enrollment	Net Change	Specialized MA Enrollment	Net Change
Asia	19%	1,600	21%	1,460
Europe	7%	2,646	49%	13,079
N. America	-3%	-4,024	38%	13,879
World**	-0.5%	-815	37%	29,495

*controlled set comparison of 2008-2009 and 2012-2013 AACSB Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) data for respective regional enrollment at AACSB-accredited institutions.

**"World” includes data from regions of Latin America, Oceania, and Africa, which are not reported separately due to small data set.

Overall, for all AACSB accredited schools in the world, MBA enrollment has decreased minimally in the past five years, but we see quite a different story for the Specialized Master’s program with a 37 percent jump over the past five years. However, MBA enrollment still exceeds that of the Specialized Master’s – in 2012-2013 MBA enrollment across all AACSB-accredited schools was at 179,994, compared to 109,726 for Specialized Master’s enrollment.

Another interesting point these data show is the difference across regions. For instance, in Asia enrollment growth for both the MBA and the Specialized MA has been relatively similar; however, within both Northern America and Europe, the growth in the Specialized MA enrollment rate has significantly exceeded that of the MBA. As the MBA becomes more established in the Asian region, as it has in parts of Northern America as well as Europe, I wonder if we will begin seeing similar trends for that region. Or, does this data suggest cultural difference and different business demands within parts of Asia, where a more “well-rounded” business knowledge is desired versus more specialized knowledge on a particular business area? What do you think?

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.