AACSB Data and Research Blog

Tenure Trends in Full-time Faculty

By Colin Nelson

Much has been said (or misstated) about systems of academic tenure in higher education. One of the more popular narratives is that tenure as an established practice is on its way out, for better or for worse. Since AACSB International tracks the numbers of full-time faculty who are tenured, tenure-track, or non-tenure-track in the annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), I thought it might be instructive to examine trends over time to see if our data bear out the popular narrative.

Figure 1. Percentages of Full-time Faculty by Tenure Status

Source: Controlled set of 494 business schools that reported tenure status data to the BSQ in all five years.

As you can see, the proportion of non-tenure-track full-time faculty has indeed been steadily on the rise, primarily (though not entirely) at the expense of the proportion of tenured faculty. While tenured faculty do not appear to be in any danger of losing their majority status yet, it is worth noting that these proportional patterns persist despite a 5 percent overall increase in the absolute number of full-time faculty reported by this controlled set of schools over the past five years. In fact, when looking at absolute numbers, the total numbers of full-time faculty in the tenured and tenure-track categories have each risen by only 1.5 percent over this period, while the number of non-tenure-track faculty has risen by nearly 19 percent.

Figure 2. Percentages of Tenured or Tenure-Track Full-time Faculty, by World Region

Source: Controlled set of 494 business schools that reported tenure status data to the BSQ in all five years. Note: The European version of the BSQ does not ask for tenure data, and there were too few schools in the set from Africa to include in Figure 2.

Looking across world regions, it seems that the trend toward decreasing use of tenured or tenure-track faculty is more pronounced in some regions than in others. The reporting schools from the Middle and Near East even reverse the trend during this period, with growth in the total numbers of tenured or tenure-track faculty, and shrinkage in the number of non-tenure-track faculty. Nevertheless, for all other world regions in which tenure data are collected, growth in the total numbers of non-tenure-track faculty outpaces growth in the numbers of tenured or tenure-track faculty, often significantly.

Faculty Qualifications Part II: Supporting Faculty

By Colin Nelson

As promised in my last post, today I discuss the categorization of supporting faculty along several dimensions. Please note that the schools included constitute the same set that I looked at in my last post, but 27 of those schools reported no supporting faculty at all, and have thus been removed from the number of schools in the tables below.

 

Table 1. Supporting Faculty by Accreditation Status of Reporting School

Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)

In contrast to the participating faculty, those who are deemed supporting faculty are more likely to be classified as Instructional Practitioners (IP) than any other qualification category defined in Standard 15. Even more so than with Scholarly Academic (SA) participating faculty, the proportion of IP-qualified supporting faculty is significantly higher in the AACSB-accredited schools; however, in this case the difference is likely due to a similarly higher proportion of supporting faculty in the non-accredited schools that have not yet been classified. This makes sense, given that those schools that have not yet attained accreditation would be less likely to have made such classification a priority.

 

Table 2. Supporting Faculty by Continental Region

Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)

Since 60 percent of the reported supporting faculty in this set are from schools in Northern America, it is clear that the overall worldwide figures are somewhat skewed in favor of Northern American proportions, but it is still interesting to look at the relative proportions across geographic regions. Unlike with SA-qualified participating faculty, only Africa and Northern America show clear majorities of supporting faculty classified as any of the four qualification categories. While it is true that supporting faculty from schools in the other regions are classified as IP more often than not (when classified at all), it is nevertheless clear that these schools are much more likely to employ SAs or Practice Academics (PAs) as supporting faculty, as well.

 

Table 3. Supporting Faculty by Program Levels Offered

Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)

As with AACSB Accreditation, the program levels offered by reporting schools appear to make major and interesting differences in their proportional complement of supporting faculty qualifications. Again, supporting faculty are classified as IP more often than not, regardless of program levels offered, but only those schools that offer undergraduate programs and not doctoral programs show clear majorities of such faculty. Schools that offer doctoral programs, or that do not offer undergraduate programs, are significantly more likely to have SA and, to a lesser extent, PA supporting faculty, which makes sense given that they would need more scholarly support in order to focus on higher-level degree programs. Interestingly, schools that offer only undergraduate programs are apparently by far the most likely type of school to have PA supporting faculty.

Faculty Qualifications Part I: Participating Faculty

By Colin Nelson

Now that the 2013 AACSB Accreditation Standards have been in place for a couple of years, a large majority of AACSB member schools are now comfortable classifying their faculty into the new qualification categories defined in Standard 15 (i.e., Scholarly Academic or SA, Scholarly Practitioners or SP, Instructional Practitioners or IP, and Practice Academics or PA). In fact, of the 770 total schools that participated in the 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), approximately 73 percent were able to report their faculty strength in those terms, broken out by participating versus supporting faculty. In this post, I discuss the categorization of participating faculty along several dimensions.

 

Table 1. Participating Faculty by Accreditation Status of Reporting School

Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)

Unsurprisingly, given the proportional requirements of Standard 15 and the relative size of the set of accredited versus non-accredited respondents to the BSQ, the SA category forms the majority of participating faculty, though the proportion is certainly higher in the AACSB-accredited schools. What I find interesting here is that the same difference in proportion of such faculty at the non-accredited respondent schools, just over 6 percent, appears to be made up by their faculty whose qualifications include a mixture of academia and professional practice (i.e., either SP or PA).

 

Table 2. Participating Faculty by Continental Region

Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)

Again, given the requirements of Standard 15, SA faculty are likely to form the majority of participating faculty regardless of where in the world the reporting school is located. However, it is interesting to see that there is still a high degree of variability across geographic regions in terms of how large a majority of SA faculty exists. In particular, schools in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to a slightly lesser extent in Europe, appear to be the most inclined to employ participating faculty of more diverse qualification categories. I should also note that the high proportion of SA faculty in Africa is likely due to the small number of respondents, and that all of those schools are either accredited or in the initial accreditation process.

 

Table 3. Participating Faculty by Program Levels Offered

Source: 2014–15 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ)

As with the other dimensions discussed above, variance in the types of degrees offered by reporting schools does not preclude the SA category’s prominence. What I find interesting here is that the schools that offer only graduate programs seem to be the most willing to hire participating faculty with more diverse qualification types. In particular, such schools show the largest proportion of SP or PA faculty, which may indicate both the necessity and freedom to include a greater emphasis on the practical knowledge at schools focused entirely on graduate-level studies.

Be on the lookout for the next post in this series, in which I will take a similar look at reported qualification types in supporting faculty!

Models of Governance (Part I)

By Colin Nelson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table 1. Reporting School Relationship Types by Region

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

 

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

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

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

Figure 1. Reporting School Relationship Types by Faculty Size

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

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.

 

Growth in Accessibility of AACSB-Accredited Online Degrees

By Colin Nelson

Much has been said regarding management education offered online, including in the archives of our own blog. While it is certainly very much up for debate whether MOOCs will all take over instruction of basic classes, or if virtual campuses will come to replace brick-and-mortar, the one thing that no one can deny is that online education is increasing in popularity and availability:

Figure 1. Number of AACSB-Accredited Schools Reporting Fully Online Programs

Note: This table includes data from a controlled set of 480 accredited schools that responded to the AACSB Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) in all five years. Please note that each school may have more than one fully online program at each given level.

480 AACSB-accredited schools, representing 34 countries and territories worldwide, participated in each of the last five annual BSQ surveys. Figure 1 (above) shows the numbers of these schools that reported offering one or more of their degree programs, at any level, in a fully online delivery format has grown by nearly 43% over the past five years. Obviously, much of that growth comes at the MBA level, while the gains in numbers of bachelor’s and specialized master’s programs offered fully online were more modest.

One notable exception to this trend is online doctoral programs. As of this writing, no AACSB-accredited school has ever reported a fully online doctoral program on the BSQ. There are, however, AACSB-accredited schools offering blended/hybrid or distance-learning doctoral programs, so who’s to say what the future may bring?

Interestingly, the regional breakdown of which schools offer their programs in the fully online format is far from even. Although schools in Northern America made up approximately 87% of the controlled set represented here, they consistently made up more than 95% of those who reported offering fully online MBA or specialist master’s programs, and 100% of those offering fully online bachelor’s programs. By contrast, there are as yet no African or Asian respondents that report fully online programs at any level, and there were none in Oceania prior to the 2010-11 survey year.

This regional concentration is at least partly a function of greater historical participation in the BSQ in Northern America. However, since the regional concentration of schools offering fully online programs remains several percentage points higher than the regional concentration of BSQ participants in all years, participation is clearly not the only contributing factor.

Given the origins of the Internet itself in the region, for example, schools in Northern America have also had the most time and opportunity to develop the virtual infrastructure necessary to make offering fully online programs feasible. Additionally, since fully online education makes geographical location largely a moot point from the perspective of potential students, the location of the offering institution probably matters less than it would for other modes of delivery.

Now, it very well may also be that schools in regions other than Northern America are underreporting their programs, or are simply underrepresented in the BSQ thus far. The number of BSQ participants outside Northern America has grown steadily over the past five years, however, and is up 45% in 2011-12 versus 2007-08. This will be a trend worth continuing to watch, particularly as our global participation grows larger and larger.

Business Schools Cannot Live by Tuition Alone

By Colin Nelson

Much has been written in recent months about the affordability of higher education. Data from AACSB’s annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) indicate that the cost of tuition has indeed risen over the past five years, though it has not done so in a uniform fashion across geographic regions:

Figure 1. Mean Undergraduate Tuition & Fees for Local Students (Single Year) at AACSB-Accredited Schools, in USD

 
Source: AACSB International Business School Questionnaire (BSQ).

The data in Figure 1 represent the mean cost for a single year of undergraduate study across a controlled set of AACSB-accredited schools in each region that reported undergraduate tuition data in all five of the most recent BSQs. Several schools in countries (or in certain select states/provinces within those countries) that legally prohibit higher education institutions from charging undergraduate tuition to domestic (or EU) nationals were removed from this analysis.

While the average tuition at accredited schools has gone up in all regions over the past five years, the rates of rise in the Americas were much faster than those of the Asia-Pacific (i.e., Asia + Oceania) and European regions. Single-year undergraduate tuition costs rose fastest in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a 30.4 percent increase over the five-year period, while those in the Asia-Pacific region rose most slowly at only 9.9 percent. The costs at European schools also rose more slowly, at 18.5 percent, while Northern American schools showed a 23.2 percent increase.

Interestingly, increases in tuition costs at the graduate level paint a very different regional picture than at the undergraduate level:

Figure 2. Mean Full-Time MBA Tuition & Fees for Local Students (Full Program) at AACSB-Accredited Schools, in USD

Source: AACSB International Business School Questionnaire (BSQ).

Again, the data for Figure 2 come from a controlled set of AACSB-accredited schools in each region that reported full-time MBA tuition data in all five of the most recent BSQs. Please note that tuition costs reported for full-time MBA programs are given for the entire program, rather than for a single year, as at the undergraduate level.

At the MBA level, mean tuition costs for accredited schools in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific regions remain relatively close over time, as compared to the mean MBA tuition cost in Europe, though they do show evidence of beginning to spread out in the latter years of the survey. The significantly higher mean MBA tuition cost in Europe makes sense, though, given that almost all of the countries where undergraduate tuition fees are banned by law are in Europe; thus it may well be that European schools seek to make this up at the graduate level. However, the rate of rise in MBA program tuition over the five years depicted here was actually the lowest in Europe, at only 21.4 percent, and only marginally higher in Latin America (at 22.8 percent), whereas at schools in both the Asia-Pacific and Northern American regions the rate was approximately 33 percent.

If it is true that the opportunity cost of higher education has risen as high as it can, tuition-wise, then business schools should expect to see more pushback from students on future tuition hikes. Where declining state support has been the norm in many countries around the world, business schools would be wise to begin looking to emphasize sources of revenue other than tuition increases to offset the loss.

Indeed, such actions may already be underway. According to our analysis of BSQ financial data from those schools that reported their sources of funds in the most recent BSQ (2011-12), on average over 11 percent of the funding reported for schools in Asia and Europe came from non-degree management education offerings, compared to less than three percent on average from schools in Northern America. This may suggest, at least in part, why the rise in tuition rates is somewhat smaller in Europe and Asia than in Northern America.