The Last Word
A Second Bite at Biz School Apple
By Peter Horner
AACSB International, the organization of business school deans that accredits business schools, recently approved new standards for accreditation that require coverage of statistical data analysis and management science in MBA and undergraduate business programs. The new standards stop short of requiring management science courses (or any other specific courses) in business schools, but they open up a door of opportunity for OR/MS education that has been closed at many schools for more than a decade.
Until 1991, both statistics and management science courses were explicitly required for accreditation. In 1991, AACSB reworded the requirements as "quantitative analysis" for MBA programs and "mathematics and statistics" for undergraduate programs. Some schools then dropped courses in management science, presumably because management science was included only implicitly in the requirements for MBA, and because many business school professors and deans were not fully aware of the impact management science has been making on organizations.
Earlier this year, Kalyan Singhal from the Merrick School of Business at the University of Baltimore initiated and led a petition drive to have statistical data analysis and management science included in the AACSB accreditation standards. The petition effort received a groundswell of support from many quarters, including senior practitioners, deans of business schools, Nobel Laureates and professors from almost all areas in business.
The petition focused on three major points: First, in order to sustain a career in business for many years, a business graduate needs an understanding of the analytic foundations and tools that are important for managerial decision-making. Second, that since management science techniques are driving operations, supply chains and e-commerce, they constitute a major driver of the economy. And third, that the explosive growth of applications of information technology itself is being driven by management science-based technologies like decision analysis, scenario generation, simulation and optimization.
Singhal submitted the petition to a Blue Ribbon Committee of business school deans that was drafting new standards for accreditation. The committee subsequently recommended, and the Accreditation Council approved, the new standards that included the coverage of the areas of statistical data analysis and management science.
While the new standards do not require any specific course in the curriculum, they do require that "normally the curriculum process will result in undergraduate and master's level general management degree programs that will include learning experiences in such management-specific knowledge and skills areas as:
- ethical and legal responsibilities in organizations and society;
- financial theories, analysis, reporting and markets;
- creation of value through the integrated production and distribution of goods, services and information;
- group and individual dynamics in organizations;
- statistical data analysis and management science supported decision-making processes throughout an organization;
- information technologies as they influence the structure and processes of organizations and economies and the roles and techniques of management;
- domestic and global economic environments of organizations;
- other management-specific knowledge and abilities as identified by the school."
Singhal notes that since the programs will have to cover the normally accepted body of knowledge in each area, it is reasonable to assume that management science will require at least one full-term course and statistical data analysis will require another.
"This change of wording would add further relevance and rigor to business education," Singhal says when asked what impact the new standards would have on business education and the business community. "In many ways, this is one of the biggest and best pieces of news in the past 10 or 20 years for INFORMS."
UCLA's Arthur Geoffrion, a past president of INFORMS who arranged for INFORMS Roundtable companies to support the petition, sees the new standards as a second opportunity for the OR/MS community to reassert itself in business schools. "The emergence of modern business schools dates from about 1959, when the Carnegie and Ford foundations issued reports lamenting the lack of rigor and research in U.S. business schools," Geoffrion notes. "OR/MS was an obvious part of the answer, so there followed a couple of decades in which courses and Ph.D. programs in statistics and management science seemed to become all but mandatory for most schools."
Alas, the OR/MS community lost its toehold in business schools in the 1990s as math-impaired MBAs opted for less rigorous classroom work at the expense of management science. Now a second opportunity for OR/MS has presented itself. The door is open. The question is, will the OR/MS community walk in and take a seat at the table?
Peter Horner (horner@lionhrtpub.com) is the editor of OR/MS Today.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2003 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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