Message from Dean George W. Gau
to members of the McCombs community:
It is with pleasure that I make this, our first, annual report to
constituents on the new metrics the McCombs School is using to gauge
institutional achievement and progress.
Our October 2003 strategic plan set a goal for McCombs of becoming the
best public business school in the nation by 2010. To measure progress
towards this goal, we committed to report on metrics in three areas:
student placement, research productivity, and student satisfaction.
The measurements below cover these areas for the 2003-2004 academic
year. Moving forward, we will report these metrics annually each fall,
posting data to the Web and circulating the information to
stakeholders.
Several highlights from this initial report:
Student satisfaction is strong across all programs. From 90 to
92 percent of students are either satisfied or very satisfied with our
three major degree programs. Just as tellingly, on average 90 percent
say they probably or definitely would recommend their program to other
students.
Placement shows need for improvement. At the undergraduate
level, McCombs was sixth in its data set for students employed at
graduation or planning to attend graduate school. At the MBA level,
where two statistics are tracked, we placed 20th out of the 20 schools
in our data set of BusinessWeek’s top 20 schools for employment at
graduation and 16th for employment three months out. The 2004 results
were an improvement over 2003, when we were out of the top 20 on these
metrics. I am confident the recent changes in our MBA program have us
on track for more improvement in MBA placement. At this time
professional graduate accounting programs do not presently track
placement data nationally so comparative placement results for our MPA
program could not be included in our metrics.
Research productivity is very strong. McCombs placed eighth among top 20 schools and the highest among all public
business schools. Productivity was measured by counting articles from
2001-2003 in the top three to four academic journals in the seven
major academic business disciplines and then ranking schools based on
their faculty's share of the collective output in these very best
journals. We believe this is the best statistical method for comparing
research productivity, and it is gratifying to see how well our
faculty performed.
Our strategic plan stated that "on all measures where we can compare
ourselves, we seek within the next decade to score higher than all
other public business schools." We have not yet reached our goals for
2010, but as this report makes clear, those goals are achievable. To
reach them will require the ongoing support of McCombs faculty,
students, alumni, friends, and corporate stakeholders. I look forward
to working with you to realize our shared vision.
George W. Gau
Dean.
McCombs School Metrics, Fall 2004
- Student placement at graduation
- Student placement 3 months out
- Student satisfaction
- Student recommended
Research Productivity
