Calling Social-Sciences Ph.D.’s — Business Schools Want You!

A business-school accreditor, AACSB International: the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, has come up with a novel plan to fill the pressing shortage of business professors: get Ph.D.‘s from other disciplines to teach business, BusinessWeek reports.

According to the article …

In the past five years, the overall production of business Ph.D.‘s declined while enrollments in undergraduate and master’s-level business programs have grown. Exacerbating the problem, an entire generation of business-school professors who received their Ph.D.‘s in the late 1960s and early 1970s are expected to retire within the next few years, leaving a vacuum in the B-school classroom that needs to be filled — and fast.

In fact, the situation is so bad that some B-schools could lose their AACSB accreditation, the reporter, Alison Damast, writes. “Some schools don’t have the financial resources or reputation and are having difficulty recruiting any new faculty,” she quotes Richard Sorensen, the chair of AACSB’s faculty-shortage work group, as saying. “They can’t meet the classroom needs for a growing number of students.”

The AACSB hopes the promise of significantly higher faculty salaries in B-schools will entice some social-sciences professors to switch fields, Damast writes. She notes, for example, that “the average salary of a new assistant professor of psychology is about $50,406 and peaks at around $76,949, according to the College & University Professional Association for Human Resources.” The average salary of a business-school marketing professor, on the other hand, is $125,000, according to a 2006 AACSB salary survey, she writes.

Of course, in order to make the switch they’ll need to earn an AACSB-endorsed certificate from an academically qualified “bridge” program at one of five business schools, Damast writes. The programs, which combine distance-learning classes, on-site weekend seminars, and research projects, may take as little as two months or up to two years, she writes, and tuition ranges from $14,000 to $40,000.

Read The Chronicle’s coverage here.