May 6, 2008

New Report Highlights Challenges Facing Business Schools Worldwide

As businesses and management education extend their global reach, educators worldwide will face serious challenges maintaining high quality, hiring enough professors, and keeping up with a host of issues from changing demographics to a growing emphasis on sustainability and social responsibility, according to a new report by the Global Foundation for Management Education.

The report identifies key economic and business trends, as well as developments in management education in various regions of the world. It then recommends steps business schools, businesses, and government can take to deal with those challenges.

The foundation is a joint effort of the world’s two largest business-school associations: AACSB International (the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) and EFMD (the European Foundation for Management Development).

Among the global trends the report examines are advances in information technology and an emerging emphasis on sustainability and social responsibility. Education issues include the shortage of business-school faculty members with doctorates and the increasing diversity of degree programs.

The foundation’s Web site also includes profiles of management education in more than 50 countries. —Katherine Mangan

Comments

1. As someone who entered a business doctoral program but did not finish, I believe that business schools are going to have to get serious about producing PhDs to meet the shortage. When I entered my doctoral program in 2001, 80% of the first year students left before the end of the first year.

   The doctoral programs want to limit the number of PhDs coming out of their programs to keep salaries high and reduce competition. When most business doctoral students have the choice between being poor, hazed, and overworked in a doctoral program or a high paying job, they won’t stay in the doctoral program for long.

   I think the profession needs to take a hard look at itself before it starts complaining about its future challenges in providing quality education by faculty members with doctorates.

   — arc    May 6, 03:25 PM    #

2. The Bridge to Business program offered in 4 doctoral schools this year should be expanded to 15 or 20 schools. Also, business programs need to view themselves as interdisciplinary rather than exclusive, scientific subjects.

   — xol    May 6, 03:56 PM    #

3. Given the viscious morally disgusting crap people generated by existing schools of business, the idea of them producing more of themselves makes life dismal for the rest of humankind. As Mintzberg remarked, we need managers not MBAs and not more MBA style faculty.

   — Richard Tabor Greene    May 6, 04:38 PM    #

4. I’m kind of surprised to read from the report that there is a shortage of business-faculty members with doctorate degrees. Gee… I must be looking in the wrong places. I have a doctorate degree in management with major in information technology and I am having a hard time getting any campus interviews.

   — Doctorate w/ 20yrs. bus. exp.    May 6, 06:07 PM    #

5. Doctorate with 20 yrs, I feel for you. I have a pile- 8 inches thick of doctoral applicants with management, I.T . or accounting concentrations. I need economics, HR, marketing, sustainability applicants…

   — David    May 6, 07:43 PM    #

6. While the efforts by GFME are admirable, the engaged reader will recognize that it misses its greatest potential. Much of the report is focused on the actions by the two sponsors and what they are doing to advance management education. They assume that only their accredited members deliver quality management education and only they offer accreditation of business schools. There is little or no mention of other accrediting bodies for business schools such as the Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP), the European Council for Business Education (ECBE), Association of MBA’s (AMBA), or Central and East European Management Development Association (CEEMAN). The quote “we conclude that there are many opportunities for international coordination and collaboration” is a conclusion, but where is the action that will achieve this? We will not find it in GFME. This opportunity will be fulfilled and the recommendations could more likely be accomplished if GFME invited all groups to their table and it truly became a voice for global management education.

   — Doug    May 7, 12:58 PM    #

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