Who should teach the nation’s business students: scholars with research doctorates, or M.B.A.'s who have worked in business but have little academic grounding?
A current accreditation standard that, in essence, calls for half of the faculty at business schools to hold Ph.D.'s has long been a point of contention. Now the debate is heating up again.
Last week, one of the two major business-school accreditors—the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International, commonly known as the AACSB—announced the formation of an accreditation-overhaul committee.
Defenders of the 50-percent rule say that it has promoted intellectual rigor and helped deny unwarranted prestige to fly-by-night business schools.
But the standard has also been criticized on three grounds. First, skeptics say that the rule has led business schools too far away from the practical professional skills that students require. Second, they say that the rule (together with a related AACSB standard that expects every faculty member to produce “intellectual contributions”) has led to a proliferation of low-quality journals that few people read. Finally, skeptics note that there simply aren’t that many people with doctorates who want to teach business. Faculty shortages have driven salaries in accounting and finance sky-high—but even so, not many accountants have been willing to sacrifice years of their lives to earn Ph.D.'s.
One of the best-known critics of the AACSB’s model is James O’Toole, a professor of business ethics at the University of Denver. “The most qualified person to teach someone who’s going to be a practicing manager or accountant,” Mr. O’Toole says, “is not necessarily someone who has the best scholarly credentials.”
The accreditor’s emphasis on academic prestige and disciplinary research, Mr. O’Toole says, “neglects what I believe our primary task should be, which is preparing the next generation of managers and business leaders.”
John J. Fernandes, chief executive of the business-school accreditor, says such criticisms are misplaced. The current standards are not so onerous, he says. Under the current accreditation standards, up to 50 percent of an institution’s faculty members may be “professionally qualified,” as opposed to academically qualified. (The AACSB does not, however, want institutions to hire random M.B.A.'s off the street; the association has standards for the deployment of professionally qualified faculty.)
“Professionally qualified people, whose credentials are based on their work experience and on having a master’s degree, can be very valuable faculty members,” Mr. Fernandes says. “But our members are academic institutions, and they try to maintain at least half of their faculty members as academically qualified. That means people who have Ph.D. training and who continue to pursue research with that terminal degree.”
Informal Standards
But how worthwhile is the research that business-school professors produce? In a widely debated 2005 article in the Harvard Business Review, Mr. O’Toole and Warren G. Bennis argued that even the best-designed business-school research is often irrelevant to most practitioners. An AACSB committee in 2008 also raised questions about the narrowness of business scholars’ research output.
But such critiques have not had much impact on universities’ choices, according to Kenneth N. Ehrensal, an associate professor of anthropology at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ehrensal was trained as an anthropologist, but until recently, he taught in Kutztown’s business program. He has written critically about how universities respond to the association’s accreditation standards, and he presented another such paper on Wednesday at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting, in New Orleans.
“I’ve been to several of the training programs that the AACSB runs for institutions that want to become accredited or maintain their accreditation,” Mr. Ehrensal says. “And at one level, they will say that they don’t define the kind of research that needs to get done. But then, informally, during the breaks or during the question-and-answer sessions, they will say, ‘Look. Any standard that does not require at least two peer-reviewed journal articles every five years from each faculty member will likely not be acceptable.’”
Richard E. Sorensen, dean of Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business and one of the chairs of the new AACSB committee on accreditation standards, insists that business schools really do have latitude to chart their own research courses.
“It’s true that we’re looking for a minimum of two scholarly activities” every five years for each faculty member, Mr. Sorensen says. “However, what is considered a scholarly activity varies. My own school has a strong research focus, and we’re looking for two peer-reviewed journal articles. Some other schools have more of a teaching focus, and they might allow for a textbook or a refereed conference presentation to count. So to say that there’s only a single standard, I don’t believe that’s correct.”
More Accounting Ph.D.'s
On one factual point, the AACSB’s leaders agree with their critics: They need more accounting and finance people in the doctoral pipeline.
Under a two-year-old program, accounting firms are paying their employees to earn doctorates, with the expectation that those people will eventually move into academe. The program recruits 30 people each year. That might not sound like many, Mr. Fernandes says, but only 100 or so doctorates are currently awarded in accounting each year in the United States. When the new program’s participants emerge from their programs, they will represent a significant increase in annual production.
The accrediting group has also tried a less orthodox strategy. In collaboration with Virginia Tech and four other universities, the association has created “bridge to business” programs in which people with doctorates in nonbusiness fields (often economics or education) are trained to become professors of finance, management, or marketing.
John S. DeJoy earned a doctorate in education, with an accounting focus, from the University of Idaho in 1998. (He also has an M.B.A., and he has worked as an accountant for a major firm and in a solo practice.) Last spring he entered the University of Florida’s four-month bridge-to-business program. His credential from that program allowed him to win a tenure-track position at Siena College, in Loudonville, N.Y., where he is now an assistant professor of accounting.
“I wanted to be definitively ‘academically qualified’ according to the AACSB,” Mr. DeJoy says. “To me, the program has already proved its worth in the job market.”
Mr. DeJoy says that the instruction during the four-month Florida program was excellent, and that the curriculum was primarily concerned with research skills: How to develop a research program and how to get papers published in the top-ranked accounting journals. But is that research focus really the best preparation for someone who will train accountants at a small institution like Siena?
Mr. DeJoy says yes. In accordance with the accreditor’s standards, Siena will expect him to maintain a research program. And in any case, he says, he can serve his students better by being well acquainted with scholarly work in the field.
Mr. O’Toole is not so sure. Probably, he says, business schools need to evolve toward something like the medical-school model, in which there are two separate tracks. Some faculty members are doing basic biomedical research, and others are engaged with training doctors. Business schools’ efforts to blend basic research with preprofessional training, he says, is not really healthy for faculty members or students.
Debate in Other Disciplines
Specialized accreditation standards have given rise to similar debates in other fields. Nursing schools, for example, have sometimes struggled to find faculty members with doctorates to teach graduate-level programs.
And in criminal justice, an accreditor known as the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences is promoting a standard in which most faculty members must have doctorates. That standard has been criticized as a threat to lawyers, who have traditionally played a major role on criminal-justice faculties.
What will come from the new AACSB committee? Mr. Sorensen is reluctant to speculate. The committee will not even hold its first meeting until February.
Asked whether the 50-percent-doctorate standard is likely to be relaxed, Mr. Sorensen says, “I’m not going to suggest that it will be, but I’m not going to rule it out, either. What we need to do is study what makes for the richness of the learning environment for the students, and how we allow for that.”