Message from Dean George W. Gau
to members of the McCombs community
I am pleased to provide you with my second report on the progress
of the McCombs School based on the assessment measures adopted in
our strategic plan.
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 metrics in three
areas: student satisfaction, student placement, and research
productivity. The measurements posted on the web site below cover
these areas for the 2005-06 academic year.
Strategic
Plan Metrics Site
When compared to the assessment results in my first
report for the 2003-04 academic year:
Student satisfaction remains very high across
all programs. From 89 to 97 percent of our students are to
varying degrees satisfied with our three major degree programs
compared to 90 to 92 percent in 2003-04. Even more impressive, on
average 96 percent say they would recommend their program to other
prospective students which is significantly higher than the 90
percent average in 2003-04.
Comparative MBA placement performance improved
substantially. Among schools ranked by BusinessWeek in the
top 20, McCombs MBA placement in 2005-06 was 13th out of the 20
schools for employment at graduation and we were tied at 6th for
employment three months from graduation. These placement results are
a substantial jump from 2003-04 when our MBA placement at graduation
was 20th out of 20 schools and 16th for employment at three months.
With Berkeley and UCLA, we now have the highest MBA placement rate
for three months from graduation of any public business school. This
improved placement performance reflects both the great work of our
MBA placement staff lead by Stacey Rudnick as well as result of the
initiative undertaken with our strategic plan to better align our
MBA program with the placement market.
Research productivity remains very strong.
McCombs tied for 7th place among leading business schools in
research productivity compared to 8th in the 2003-04 report. With
UCLA, we have the highest productivity among all public business
schools. Based on data collected by the University of Texas at
Dallas, research productivity is measured by counting articles from
2001-2005 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. Along with other top business schools, we believe this is
the best measure 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". I am happy to tell you that, on most
of our metrics, we now have among the best performances of any
public business school. I am grateful to McCombs faculty and staff
for their excellent contributions to help us perform so well along
with the ongoing support of our alumni, friends, and corporate
stakeholders. Our school is now closing in on our goal of becoming
the best public business school.
George W. Gau
Dean
