Leading in the 21st Century
McCombs A Four-Year Progress Report
By George W. Gau
While I am happy with the achievements of the last four years, there are still challenges ahead for our school. The time is right to look at updating “Leading in the 21st Century”and determine further next steps we should take to guarantee all of our goals are met before the start of the next decade.
During the 2002–03 academic year, the McCombs School of Business undertook a comprehensive review of its programs and academic disciplines. Peer assessments conducted by leading business faculty and deans from around the country were considered along with input from McCombs faculty, students, staff, alumni, business supporters and the Provost Office.
The review culminated in a new strategic plan for the school, “Leading in the 21st Century,” which was adopted in October 2003. The plan established one overarching goal for the McCombs School: to become the best public business school in the nation. It also described the strategy, funding model and assessment measures essential to meet the goal by 2010.
In the last four years, we have been successful in accomplishing much of the work. In fact, of the 19 action steps listed in the plan, we have totally or substantially completed 18 items, including: hiring new tenure-track faculty; reducing the size and realigning the emphasis of our full-time MBA program; strengthening our research environment; creating the Jump Start diversity program; establishing a new weekend MBA program in Houston; and developing the new AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center. (To see the complete list of action steps and read more details about the status of their completion, read 2003-2007 Accomplishments in Implementing the Strategic Plan.)
With these achievements in mind, let us take the opportunity to look toward the future. There are four pressing issues the school needs to consider.
McCombs and the university need to commit to further reducing our student/faculty ratio.
Following the adoption of “Leading in the 21st Century,” The University of Texas at Austin proposed in its Commission of 125 (in 2004) that UT’s colleges and schools should have a student/faculty ratio of 17/1 or less. Assuming the number of students taught by McCombs does not change, our student/faculty ratio will drop to 23/1 when we complete the hiring of the remaining 24 tenure-track faculty prescribed in “Leading in the 21st Century.” To fulfill the Commission’s goal of a student faculty ratio of 17/1, we must either increase the number of faculty in the school by 62 (beyond the 24 new hires currently planned) or reduce the number of students we teach by about 1,000. Either choice presents difficult challenges for the school.
Based on the current academic labor markets and the importance of maintaining our high standards in faculty recruiting, McCombs would likely need six to eight years to hire an additional 62 tenure-track faculty. Adding such a large number of faculty would require a substantial amount of new funding and a significant expansion of our office and classroom space.
Cutting enrollment is perhaps an even bigger challenge. The academic programs we offer are very popular with prospective students, and the BBA program has the highest demand among large undergraduate programs at the university. What’s more, because our undergraduate students have some of the highest academic qualifications at UT, decreasing enrollment would reduce the overall quality of the university’s student body—a result nobody wants.
An additional problem with trying to further constrain the number of McCombs students is that under our strategic plan we temporarily reduced the number of students in our full-time MBA program. It may be time for the school to return at least a portion of the earlier size of that program to continue building its national presence.
An issue the McCombs School will need to evaluate is the large number of business classes we provide UT students from colleges outside of the business school. About 25 percent of the semester credit hours taught in the McCombs School are to non-business students. No professional school on campus offers as many educational opportunities to students outside of its school as McCombs. At the MBA level we have nine dual degree programs enrolling students from Communications, Engineering, Law, Liberal Arts, Natural Sciences, Nursing and Public Affairs. At the undergraduate level we offer the Business Foundations Program, which enables non-McCombs students to minor in business by taking up to six courses in our school. Starting next year, additional educational demands will be placed on the school when we provide signature courses for freshmen and sophomores across campus under the new UT undergraduate studies initiative.
One of the challenges in offering so many educational services to students outside of the business school is that the university has failed to recognize this type of service in its allocation of institutional funding. The university historically has allocated a disproportionately small share of institutional funds to the McCombs School per semester credit hour (SCH) taught as compared to other professional and nonprofessional schools on our campus.
In 2005–06 (the most recent academic year when comparative data are
available), the McCombs School received only $225 per SCH in university
institutional funds, quite less than the amount received by the School
of Law and the LBJ School of Public Affairs (the chart shows the
amount of institutional funding—i.e., state appropriations and tuition—for that year allocated to UT schools per semester credit
hour). When the funding figures are adjusted for the relative faculty salaries at different UT schools to reflect the
comparative cost of producing a SCH, our effective level of
institutional support is even less. If our school is to continue to
provide the high level of educational services it currently offers to
non-business students while still improving the quality of education we
offer McCombs students, the university needs to recognize that service
in its allocation of institutional funding.
McCombs needs to continue building on the national reputation of its full-time MBA program.
The realignment of our full-time MBA program to better focus on the core business disciplines, along with the improvements we have made in program delivery, have significantly enhanced the national reputation of our MBA program. Our MBA students are now better prepared to take positions with leading companies. More strategic consulting and investment banking firms are interested in our MBA students, and we are beginning to be identified as one of their small number of “core schools” for MBA recruitment. As an example, last year McCombs was selected by JPMorgan Chase as one of its national core schools for the first time.
As the school moves forward in its strategic planning, it should continue to stress the importance of strengthening the national reputation of our full-time MBA program. An issue that should be considered is the role of our part-time MBA programs for working professionals that we offer in Austin, Dallas and Houston in that strategy. Those three programs have a combined student enrollment that is about the same as our full-time program. Through these programs, we teach a large number of Texas students seeking an MBA. Last year, about one-half the MBA graduates of our working-professionals programs entered the placement market seeking new positions with Texas firms. If these programs satisfy much of the need of Texas students for MBAs along with the demand of Texas firms for MBA graduates, the school should evaluate whether to have a larger portion of the enrollment in our full-time MBA program consist of non-resident students. Bringing more students from outside of Texas to our full-time MBA could potentially enhance its national reputation.