Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/63444
RISK Business Schools at Serious, pervasive forces— such as faculty shortages, pressures to enhance curricular relevance, and intense, worldwide competition—are threatening traditional business schools. Anew AACSB International task force may help to find collective solutions. 48 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2002 C and delivered. In fact, that future is now. Prominent issues that are effecting change today must be dealt with immedi- ately by business schools that still want to be staffed, rele- vant, and funded tomorrow. In a move designed to help business schools meet the hallenges confront the field of management education on all sides, and, in the future, these challenges will rad- ically reshape the way business education is designed future with all the tools and information they require, AACSB International has created a Management Education Task Force to identify educational priorities and recommend responses. Formed last year as a subcommittee of AACSB's Board of Directors, the Task Force has met and collected data over the course of the last year. It recently presented a draft report to the AACSB board, identifying issues con- fronting management educators worldwide and offering sug- gestions for meeting the problems head-on. While the report is continually being revised, and the committee's work is still in progress, some key findings from the first report are now available and were discussed at the AACSB Annual Meeting in Chicago last month. Putting It in Context Students who want to get business degrees today have a great many more options than they did in the past. In fact, only 24.4 percent of today's MBA students are enrolled full- time in a traditional two-year program. Just over 58 percent are part-timers; another 5.2 percent are in executive MBA programs, and 2.5 percent are enrolled in distance education programs. In addition, many of those students are choosing to seek degrees outside of traditional or accredited schools: The percent of degrees awarded by for-profit institutions increased from one percent in 1992 to 6.2 percent in 1999. The fragmentation of the market is underscored by the fact that these students can go, literally, almost anywhere in the world to get their degrees. Among the top 50 schools ranked by Financial Times, an average of 44.1 percent of full-time enrollees were categorized as "international," or not from the home country of the school they were attend- ing. Seventeen percent of U.S. students studying abroad studied business and management in 1999–2000, according to the Institute for International Education. According to the IIE, more than 19 percent of all foreign students study- ing in the U.S. in 2000–2001 were studying business, and more than 14 percent of MBA students in the U.S. were from abroad. Last year, 18 percent of the students at the London Business School were American, and 11 percent of INSEAD's January 2002 class were Americans.