What Do Candidates Look for While Selecting a B-School?

Over 15,000 schools offer business degree programs worldwide. A majority of the institutions including the educators and practitioners believe that they clearly understand and address the expectations of any current or prospective student that intends to enroll with them. This belief is flawed and contradictory since there is significant divergence between students' expectations and the ground reality after the student enrolls for the program. This chapter aims to outline key deciding criteria that may enable a prospective candidate to assess schools before application. The factors include, but are not limited to, drawing up a list of potential schools, shortlist the “top” schools matching the offered programs and aspirations, future career path desired, amongst other important parameters such as diversity, class profile, and financial investment. The factors discussed also highlight the key areas where business schools can meet and exceed expectations and go the extra mile that will help them differentiate against competition.

Has the Quality of Accounting Education Declined?

ABSTRACT For decades, prominent members of the accounting community have argued that the quality of accounting education is falling. Support for this claim is limited because of a scarcity of data characterizing the constructs of interest. This study is a comparative evaluation of the quality of accounting education from the 1970s to the 2000s using unique data to quantify education quality for accounting and many comparison disciplines. I find that, compared to most other types of college education, accounting education quality has been steady or increasing over the sample period. However, relative to other business degree programs, the evidence is mixed. The quality of students self-selecting non-accounting business degrees has increased while the quality of accounting students has not. The disparity in student quality is not reflected in the pay received by accounting graduates, which has remained stable relative to the pay received by graduates with other business degrees, although this result is likely influenced by regulatory changes during the 2000s, including Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). Together, the evidence suggests that the quality of accounting education has not declined rapidly over the last four decades, but in the competition among business degree programs for high-quality students, accounting has underperformed. Data Availability: Data used in this study are available in the Freshman and Senior Surveys of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles; the IPUMS-USA database, which is compiled and distributed by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota; the National Survey of College Graduates, which is available from the National Science Foundation; and the General Social Survey, which is maintained by the National Opinion Research Center at The University of Chicago.