New CD-ROM on "Earned Degrees in Management Education, 1992-1997" Helps Schools Monitor Trends in Business and Management Education in the U.S.

A long-simmering demand for usable data and information on management education enrollment trends has been satisfied with the debut of AACSB's "Earned Degrees in Management Education, 1992-1997" CD-ROM. The CD was rolled out in April at the AACSB Annual Meeting in Atlanta.

Produced in collaboration with Kenneth C. Green, visiting scholar at the Claremont Graduate University, the CD takes government survey data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), plus information on schools' accreditation status, and presents it in more than 90 highly accessible data tables. The CD also contains a summary data report that provides additional details about the enrollment shifts affecting various fields and student populations that comprise management education in the U.S.

"There's been a huge demand on the part of deans, program chairs, faculty and people on the corporate side who would like to understand with greater detail, precision and timeliness some of the trends occurring, not just in total numbers of individuals earning degrees, but also in populations, such as accounting, information systems, women, specific minority students and foreign students," Green said. "Are they going up, going down? How do they compare across each group and by different sectors?"

Although the data collected annually by the U.S. Department of Education has long been available to educators, simply having the aggregate numbers has not enabled planners and decision makers to put their own situations in context.

"Surprisingly, there is little descriptive data about the entire management education industry," said Charles Hickman, director of member relations for AACSB.

"That makes it difficult for schools to have reliable information to use in their own planning and strategy. It also makes it difficult for the industry to say, with confidence or precision, what enrollment and graduation trends in management education really are, particularly when you want to know those trends by major, citizenship, race or gender," Hickman said.

Hickman gave the example of the "myth" that enrollment by women in MBA programs is going down. "That is simply not the case if you look at the data," he said. "Now there are facts, instead of anecdotes or myths, to frame planning strategy debate."

The need and desire for such facts surfaced clearly again on the recent AACSB membership survey. Sixty-six percent of the respondents said the association should place strong emphasis on management education industry trends, and another 30 percent said moderate emphasis should be placed upon them.

"The test for AACSB, knowing that the data from IPEDS had value for members and affiliates, was how to make them readily available," Green said. "Part of what we did was take the raw data and organize it in a fashion that allows anybody who can open a spread sheet to look at these data and begin to use them. There is virtually no learning curve in terms of understanding how to use this. We give some background information, tell you what's on the CD, and offer a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section. We've kept it simple and direct, but also comprehensive."

The CD provides a way for educators and practitioners to customize information across institutions, regions or the whole country, by enrollment numbers, programs offered, degrees awarded, accreditation status and student demographics.

Deans, program chairs or faculty can compare what is happening in their school with what is happening in other local schools, with schools with similar missions, with schools with similar offerings, or other variables.

"You can do lots of different cuts with these data on the CD," Green said. "You can say, 'Our experience has been X over this period of time, how does that compare to similar institutions? Are we unique, are we part of the pack?'"

Green provided an example of how a business dean might use the information on the CD-ROM to begin an inquiry into what is happening in a particular department. The dean of ACME State College might look at the school's undergraduate marketing degrees over five years and see they were down 45 percent, while the overall number of undergrads earning degrees with a specialization in marketing went down 27 percent in the same time. The dean then could look at what the marketing degree trend was in the Public Master's institutions, at the trend in accredited Public Master's institutions, and at the trend for the 10 schools most like ACME on the basis of size and region.

With these comparative trends, Green said, the dean wouldn't know what had happened, but he/she would have some clues to help determine whether the marketing program was uniquely off the mark, or whether the school's drop was part of some other trend. "It doesn't point to a solution," Green said, "but it certainly provides an indicator to issues. You can start asking more precise questions."

As deans, department chairs or professors work through the data in their own ways, they can produce specific reports for their constituents, from trustees, to university administrators, associate deans, department members, corporate advisers, alumni, accreditation visiting teams, or anyone else. "This could have a huge impact on strategizing," Green said.

Corporations might have an interest in the CD-ROM to help them better focus their recruitment efforts. If they are looking for campuses with large populations of certain groups, they can pinpoint those campuses using the CD.

"It's an interesting irony that corporations have much better data about their operations than business schools," Green said, "reflected by financials and other kinds of metrics. They report quarterly profits a couple of weeks after the quarter ends. Campuses don't report enrollments until the numbers are public and aggregated by the government—as much as two years later. There has not been a consistent, reliable way to get some of that information—no systematic national resource, like a census."

The "Earned Degrees in Management Education" CD-ROM is the first in a line of products/trend reports that AACSB will produce on a quarterly basis, Hickman said. "This product is a forerunner of regular reports on enrollment trends and student characteristics, curriculum policies and trends, faculty salaries and supply and demand, and other operating issues in business schools that AACSB will start to produce in the next fiscal year."

Three of the four quarterly reports will deal with enrollment, faculty and curriculum issues, respectively. The fourth report will be different each year and will focus on an issue that doesn't require annual updating, or that is of interest to only a particular segment of the membership, Hickman said.

The first CD can be considered a pilot in that members are invited and encouraged to give feedback about whether the content and format is useful and how it could be improved.

"We want to position this product as an early piece of AACSB's effort to expand, or build, a core competence in collecting, filtering and disseminating data and information about the management education industry to its members and key external stakeholders," said Hickman.

Green, well known to management educators for his report, "After the Boom: Management Majors in the 1990s," which AACSB commissioned, and for his annual surveys on computer usage in higher education, "was an obvious choice for working with AACSB on the CD," Hickman said. Also working on the project with Green and AACSB was JBL Associates, of Bethesda, Md.

Contact AACSB International for information on how to order "Earned Degrees in Management Education, 1992-1997"