Does Academic Research Help or Hurt MBA Programs
In the September 2008 issue, Mitra and Golder address a thought-provoking question that is of great interest to academics and practitioners: Does Academic Research Help or Hurt MBA Programs? They note that this topic has not attracted much research attention. It is reassuring that they find empirical evidence that academic research output has positive long-term effects on perceptions of academics, recruiters, and applicants. In addition, academic research has a similar effect on education performance and generates short-term effects on the perceptions of academics.
The authors are to be commended for their careful analysis and for exploring alternative measures of variables to demonstrate/reaffirm the robustness of their results. Their research raises at least two new questions for further research:
(1) Annual rankings of MBA programs, such as the one reported by the Financial Times (see http://rankings.ft.com/global-mba-rankings), where the "Research" component or input for the MBA ranking is calculated “according to the number of faculty publications in 40 international academic and practitioner journals. Points are awarded to the business school at which the author is currently employed. The total is weighted for faculty size.” As more evidence unfolds about the link between academic research at B-schools and the reputation of their MBA programs, researchers should focus on the appropriate weight that should be assigned to the Research output component of B-school performance metrics that contribute to the MBA rankings.
(2) There has been considerable debate that academic research must go beyond quantitative metrics (e.g., “counting” the number of journal articles published) toward assessing qualitative metrics (e.g., focus on variations in the quality of different journal outlets, focus on differences across journal articles in terms of their “relevance” to stakeholders at B-schools).
I deeply appreciate the authors’ contributions in a new and exciting area of research in which authoritative insights are sorely needed. I hope to see more research work on this topic in future. Finally, and most important, I look forward to thoughtful comments from JM readers on this article. As you know, a key goal of the JM blog is to provide a forum that stimulates a productive and intellectually stimulating dialog among you.
by Siva K. Balasubramanian, Journal of Marketing Website Editor
