Leading in the 21st Century
McCombs A Four-Year Progress Report
By George W. Gau
McCombs needs to take advantage of the new AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center to strengthen its presence in executive education while continuing to develop its research reputation.
The McCombs School has expanded substantially its executive education operation during the last five years. The opening of the Houston MBA and the growth of the Dallas MBA and our custom non-degree programs have increased the school’s executive education net revenue from under $1 million in 2001–02 to more than $6 million in 2006–07. This expansion has increased the opportunities for our faculty to leverage their research expertise by teaching important concepts to executives and managers and building the faculty’s relationships with business leaders. The opening of the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center in August 2008 will offer an exciting new opportunity for the McCombs School to establish a broader role in executive education and further build relationships with leading companies through new residential open and custom programs.
As the school develops our strategy for taking advantage of the AT&T Center, we will need to ensure that our research and campus teaching responsibilities are not neglected because of the expansion of our executive education—a problem other leading business schools have faced. The expertise that our faculty have developed through their research is a valuable resource in attracting companies to our executive education offerings. If the school fails to support its research by placing too great an emphasis on growing executive education, we will lose our comparative advantage over time. The high quality of our teaching and research are the “crown jewels” of the McCombs School, and we should have a strategy for further growth of executive education that is consistent with this heritage.
Changes need to be made in our existing buildings.
Though the new AT&T Center will provide the McCombs School with the finest residential executive education facility in the country, the three UT buildings currently used by the school for our academic programs on campus are not of similar quality. Many of our competing peer business schools have built new buildings over the past decade, while the youngest of our campus buildings, GSB, is more than 30 years old. Our buildings are sound, functional and are equipped with the latest technology. We have certain spaces within the threebuilding complex that are very contemporary and state-of-the-art, including the MBA cohort classrooms, the Ford Career Center and the AIM Trading Room/EDS Trading Center. Yet, when compared to newer business school buildings on other campuses, the external appearance of our complex looks a bit dated and portions of the buildings need to be upgraded
.The school should assess what changes need to be made in our campus buildings to support our goal of becoming the best public business school. Assuming the new AT&T Center is a profitable real estate investment, the school will have more financial resources in the future that could be applied to making major improvements to our infrastructure. Last spring, the school hired an Austin design firm, fd2s, to study the GSB and CBA buildings and provide ideas of how we could upgrade them and improve their functionality. Over the summer the firm submitted a report that offered some interesting conceptual designs for enhancing the two buildings. The school can use the report to help determine what changes should be made in our building complex to have the appearance and quality that supports our ambitions.
Everyone at the McCombs School of Business, from faculty, staff and students to alumni, friends and corporate partners, has much to be proud of. Working together, we’ve accomplished so much over the past five years. But as we recognize these achievements, let’s continue to look forward to the work that remains to make McCombs the country’s top public business school.
Measuring our progress
How will we know if the McCombs School of Business is making progress toward its goal of becoming the best public business school?
One possibility would be to rely on the rankings performed periodically by business publications. The problem with that approach is that those rankings are incomplete. Each has its own methodology, and even in total the rankings would only measure a portion of the determinants necessary to fully judge the quality of a business school. (See page 23 to read more about ranking surveys.)
In measuring our progress, we use output measures through which the school can assess its progress and for which the school can be held accountable. To the extent possible, the assessment measures are compared with other competing schools. There are three types of measures that we use:
Undergraduate and Graduate Student Placement
For the McCombs School to be successful, our students must have good job opportunities when they graduate. For undergraduate business students, placement success is determined by both job choices and, for some, acceptance into law and medical schools as well as Ph.D. programs. MBA and MPA students generally enter the employment market upon graduation; their placement in terms of the number and the quality of their employment choices is a valuable measurement tool. For our Ph.D. program, we measure the extent to which we place our doctoral students as faculty at other leading business schools and compare that placement to our competition.
Research Productivity and Impact
We want the McCombs faculty to be productive researchers in terms of publishing in top-tier academic journals, and we want their research to have an impact on their business disciplines. We assess research productivity by measuring the number of articles our faculty publish in selected top journals and compare that publication record to faculty at other leading schools. We also assess our impact by measuring the number of times research from our school is cited in research produced by faculty outside McCombs.
Student Satisfaction
It is important for our students to feel they received a high-quality education that prepared them well for their future business careers. Our graduating BBA, MBA and MPA students are surveyed each spring to determine their level of satisfaction. This measure is difficult to compare to other schools because of the absence of published, unbiased data on student satisfaction at various business schools.
On all measures where we can compare ourselves, we seek to score higher than all other public business schools. To read more about the plan’s metrics and see the current results, go to McCombs School Metrics.