AACSB International’s new BSQ Finances Module has enabled us to gather unprecedented amounts of data on governance models at business schools across the world. Since my previous post covered their relationship with their parent institution, if any, and aspects of governance have been covered in our most recent eNEWSLINE, today I’ll discuss the levels of autonomous control that our respondent schools enjoy over various organizational functions of the business school.
All participating schools are asked to indicate which entity has primary control over each specific organizational function: whether it be the business school itself; its parent institution; both jointly together; or an independent organization of some type. Obviously, independent “standalone” (Type C) business schools do not select the parent or joint options, but all schools have the option to select “N/A” if a specific function is not present at their school:
Table 1. Control of Organizational Functions in Business Schools
As you can see, there are a lot of data to be teased out here. Just a couple observations I thought were interesting: Firstly, student residential centers were (perhaps understandably) the most likely to be under the control of an entity other than the business school, but I thought it interesting that this was the case regardless of relationship type.
Secondly, I was intrigued by the functions that were less likely to be present at all. If you look at the numbers of respondents reporting the functions at their school, you can see that there are far fewer business schools where non-degree executive education centers or even research centers are reportedly present, relative to some of the other functions that almost every school reported on, such as information technology.
What observations do you make?