Bridging the Business Faculty Gap

Business schools hope that converting teachers from other academic disciplines will resolve an ongoing shortage of professors

by Alison Damast

The future business-school classroom could be a bleak place in the next decade, with lecture rooms filled with eager students but nary a professor in sight. It's a vision that has sent business-school leaders scrambling in recent years to find innovative ways to address a projected shortage of business PhDs.

By next year, however, some of those spots could be filled by academics who, while they are experienced teachers, haven't stood in front of a B-school class before. To prepare, the professors will participate in a so-called bridge program to be launched at five business-school campuses next year.

John Fernandes, president of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the accrediting agency that came up with the program, says that the professional situation in business-school classrooms is at a tipping point. "Without any intervention, the student-to-faculty ratio will get really disturbing in the future," he says.

Accreditation at Stake

Business-school leaders have reason for concern. In the past five years, the overall production of business PhDs declined while enrollments in undergraduate and masters level business programs have grown. Exacerbating the problem, an entire generation of business-school professors who received their PhDs in the late 1960s and early 1970s are expected to retire within the next few years, leaving a vacuum in the B-school classroom that needs to be filled—and fast.

The situation is so dire that some business schools could eventually be in danger of losing their AACSB accreditation because of the faculty shortage, says Richard Sorensen, the chair of AACSB's faculty shortage workgroup. "Some schools don't have the financial resources or reputation and are having difficulty recruiting any new faculty," says Sorensen, who is also the dean of Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business, which is participating in the bridge program. "They can't meet the classroom needs for a growing number of students."

Show 'Em the Money

With a decreasing array of options, the B-school world is looking to the larger academic world for help, hoping to convince a psychology professor, for example, to take a job as a marketing professor. Organizers said they believe the program will appeal to professors in the social sciences, who could easily double their salaries by moving into a faculty position at a business school. The average salary of a new assistant professor of psychology is about $50,406 and peaks at around $76,949, according to the College & University Professional Association for Human Resources. Contrast that with the average salary of a business-school marketing professor, which is $125,000, according to a 2006 AACSB salary survey.

It's a striking imbalance that the AACSB hopes to use to recruit new PhDs, promising them higher salaries and more career opportunities if they move into the B-school world. The accreditation group has taken a multipronged approach to the faculty shortage problem, devising strategies revolving around their accreditation standards—which requires member schools to have at least 50% of their classes taught by academically qualified (PhD) faculty, with 40% allowed for "professionally qualified" (non-PhD) teachers, and 10% of faculty that might not qualify as either.

A Stronger Bridge?

The AACSB first tackled the issue last year by rolling out the first part of its bridge program—known as PQ Bridge (for professionally qualified)—one that trained business-world professionals to be classroom teachers. The program has had mixed results so far, with only 15 of the initial 75 graduates finding teaching positions as of this September.