As long ago as the early 2000s, a US agency that
accredits business schools worldwide, AACSB International, set up a
task force to investigate the crisis. Its two reports, Management Education at Risk (2002) and Sustaining Scholarship in Business Schools (2003), are still the most recent source for reliable figures. They reported a 19% decline in the numbers of new
doctorates (PhDs) in business studies between 1995 and 2001 and
predicted that the problem will deteriorate further over the next
decade.
Senior associate dean for academic affairs at the
Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, Douglas A Shackelford, says: “I tell people that finding good
people is now my primary job. Where do I find them? Wherever I can”.
Professor Shackelford compares the situation to needing a repair to
your roof and putting it off from year to year. “I wouldn’t say we're
in a real crisis yet, but some time in the future—and I don’t know
when—we may well be.”
Crisis or not, there are three main reasons for
the current shortage. The first is simple demographics. The “baby boom”
generation (born after the second world war), which has supplied the
bulk of business school faculty over the past 20 years is now rapidly
reaching retirement age and is not being replaced. At the same time,
the rise in the number of business schools in China, India, and central
and Eastern Europe has dramatically increased the demand for qualified
faculty—often recruited from the US and Western Europe. The problem is
compounded by the fact that the supply of new business studies PhDs is
shrinking.
Big money transfers
While there is little that can be done to overcome
the inevitable effects of demographic change (though some claim to see
an easing of the situation in a few years’ time), the growing
competition between schools is a real problem.
Academic dean at Manchester Business School (MBS)
in the UK, Professor Ken Green, says the competition for top faculty is
global and that individuals often move between leading schools, rather
like highly paid football stars.
“At MBS, we have an aspiration to be among the
very best schools in the world by 2015,” he says. “That means being
world- class in the quality of our offering and in the quality of our
faculty.”
The problem, of course, is that so does everybody
else. Inevitably, the laws of supply and demand mean that faculty pay
is rising—and has been for some years—well above the level of
inflation. But equally noticeable is the increasingly global nature of
faculty recruitment.
While many US schools still rely on home-grown
talent—Kenan-Flagler, for example, recruits most of its junior faculty
from the 20 or 30 top US schools—the PhD intake in the US is becoming
increasingly global and this is going to have a major impact on the
make-up of faculty at leading US schools.
Biggest will be best
However, the shortages are not affecting all
schools equally. Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College, for
example, claims not to have too much difficulty attracting the faculty
it needs and it is not alone in this.
Vice-dean of Instituto de Empresa (IE) in Madrid,
Julio de Castro, says that, while he regularly hears complaints about
the difficulties of recruiting faculty, IE has not faced any real
problems and has had a good response to faculty recruitment.
“We see a lot of people who want to live in
Europe, particularly Spain, and we do particularly well with Europeans
and Latin Americans who have been studying in the US and now want to
come to Europe,” he says. “I think people are now a lot less afraid of
an international career and less worried about leaving the US. The rise
of good schools in Europe has also had a lot to do with it.”
It is likely that the biggest schools will be best
placed to weather the crisis. Tuck’s senior associate dean, Robert G
Hansen, agrees that there could be a growing split in the US between
the top and mid-tier schools, which are probably hardest hit by the
faculty crisis and are increasingly dependent on visiting and adjunct
faculty to meet their teaching obligations.
Prof Shackelford at Kenan-Flagler has his own
ideas why the number of faculty produced, especially in the US, is
drying up. One is that business schools have become too focused on
published rankings.
“Before the ranking, there were two ways of
building your school’s reputation. The first was by the number and
quality of PhD students you produced and the second was what other
similar institutions thought of you. After the rankings appeared in the
late 1980s, it was what magazines and newspapers said about you.
“I think what a lot of schools did was to look at
the cost of producing PhDs and say that that money could be better
spent on the full-time MBA programmes, which is usually what is ranked.
You may have to take on three PhD students to produce one good one.
That’s expensive and the returns are very long-term.”
Indeed, while it may be a little unfair to blame
published rankings entirely, it is true that producing PhDs is
expensive and offers little immediate return.
The AACSB points out that in the US around 80% of
funding for doctoral programmes comes directly from institutions’ own
resources, whereas outside the US doctoral students are more likely to
fund themselves or be employed as junior faculty. Making the issue
worse in the US, according to AACSB, is the fact that the large
majority of doctoral programmes are within public universities, which
are facing severe budgetary constraints at present.
It is also true that faculty shortages are often
very function-specific. In the UK, for example, in certain subject
areas such as accounting, finance and strategy there is a continual
problem of recruiting because of a shortage of candidates. This is
partly down to a lack of PhD students in this area. But even if this
were addressed, schools would still face competition for candidates
from consulting firms, which pay significantly higher salaries.
Those who can, teach
Faculty shortages also have considerable
implications for research. While the top schools will continue to be
able to attract leading researchers—in fact, in order to attract
faculty they are devoting even more resources to research—it is now
difficult to build a cohort of researchers in a particular field
because people are spread more thinly and the shift of resources
towards the full-time MBA means there is an increased emphasis on
teaching.
However there is no reason why teaching and
research should be mutually exclusive. Schools have to undertake
research because in many ways it is their raison d'être (and,
besides, it helps in attracting companies who are looking for the
latest ideas). But they also need people who can turn that research
into teaching material that is useful to companies and their
executives. It is this transfer of knowledge that is the real challenge
now facing business schools.
Opinions differ as to how the situation will
develop. Prof Shackelford at Kenan-Flagler is pessimistic: “I don’t
think the situation is good,” he says. “I can’t say I can see light at
the end of the tunnel. The increase in faculty pay might make you think
that it would attract people, but that’s going to be a slow
response—five to 10 years. Even if governments said today that we are
going to increase the number of faculty, it would be a number of years
before you saw any great improvement in scholarship.”
Tuck's Dean Hansen counters, “I don’t think it’s
all that different today than in the past. It’s always been tough to
get good people. After all, you are looking for someone who can teach,
carry out scholarly research and relate to senior executives. That’s a
tough mix. They can earn a lot of money doing something else.”
After all, you are looking for someone who can teach,
carry out scholarly research and relate to senior executives. That’s a
tough mix. They can earn a lot of money doing something else.
的确如此啊，呵呵
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