The latest survey on college presidents' pay showed most of their salaries continue to climb, as families struggle to cover tuition bills and congressional leaders scrutinize higher-education finances.

Some of the largest increases lately have been at public universities, according to the annual pay survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education, a trade magazine.

For the 2007-2008 academic year, the most recent covered by the survey, median compensation for public-university presidents was $427,400, up 7.6% from $397,349 during the previous academic year. That was about 2.6 percentage points above the inflation rate for the period.

Fifty-nine public-university presidents were paid $500,000 or more, up from 43 the previous academic year.

During 2006-07, the latest academic year for which private-school data were available, median compensation at liberal-arts colleges hit $293,967, up 6.5% from the previous academic year. That exceeded the consumer-inflation rate for the period by 3.8 percentage points.

• Database: Pay for Public-University Presidents
• Database: Pay for Presidents of Private Institutions

The price of leadership continues to rise in higher education, in terms of presidential pay at private universities and particularly at public ones.

Tall, silver-haired, immaculately dressed, John Wells looks every inch the corporate executive. Hardly surprising, you might think, for a man who has spent much of his life working in business and management consultancy. But his corporate background was only half the reason for his appointment in April as president of IMD, in Switzerland.

...Prof Wells has both an MBA and DBA from Harvard Business School (as well as a first class honours degree from Oxford University in nuclear and solid state physics) and a solid academic teaching and publications record. Before joining IMD, he was professor of management practice at Harvard, where he taught the core strategy course on the MBA programme...

...“My first priority is to replace those who are leaving, “ says Prof Wells. But things will not stop there. “Our priority is faculty, faculty, faculty...I would love to wake up one day and know we didn’t have to scramble.”...

...Prof Wells. “I’m encouraging faculty to take on learning partners [corporate clients] in other parts of the world.”

He has five regions in mind – China, India, South America, the Middle East and Africa. One of the biggest conundrums for Prof Wells is what to do in North America, arguably the market he knows best.

...Prof Wells has no intention of opening a second campus overseas. “If it’s tough to manage a business school, it’s even tougher to manage two.”..

..."A one-size MBA makes no sense to me at all,” says the new president. Under discussion is whether to increase the number enrolled on the programme from the current 90; another is to develop the MBA as a sandwich programme with study and work interweaved.

What does it take to be a business school dean?

Click here to download the article from EFMD's Global Focus magazine.(226KB)

Nearly a quarter of British business schools have changed or are changing their deans. Julie Davies, Head of Research and Development at the Association of Business Schools, reports on ABS research that shows what deans themselves think is needed for the job.

When asked what personal qualitiesa business school dean should possess currently
and in the future, the deans consistently chose the following six characteristics for
now and for five years hence from a list of 45 suggested attributes:
– Strategic leadership
– Communication skills
– Leading change
– Political skills
– Ability to develop relationships
– External networking
Further investigation of the data revealed the deans anticipated that over the
next five years they would regard trust, collegiality, academic credibility and selfawareness
as less important and they expected to concentrate instead on performance
and results.

The deans in the survey listed the top ten challenges they face as:
1. Recruiting, retaining and developing faculty and staff
2. Understanding the value of individuals’ contributions and managing
underperformance
3. Raising capital for necessary facilities and expansion
4. Managing the process and outcomes of the national Research Assessment
Exercise (results due 18 December 2008), the annual National Student Survey
(for all final-year undergraduates), accreditations and rankings
5. Developing a differentiated brand image
6. Internationalising faculty, students and competitiveness
7. Determining an appropriate balance between different income streams
8. Understanding engagement with business
9. Developing appropriate strategies for different markets
10. Creating an appropriate student experience

for more articles from Global Focus visit www.efmd.org/globalfocus

Extracts:

It is often said that the best candidates aren’t looking for a new job: they are either content in their roles or snapped up by headhunters. That might be true, but perhaps their interest can be aroused in passing – while browsing a news website, for example.

This is one of the ideas behind the redesign of the Times Online Career & Jobs website, placing the career-advice information and the link to the job- search pages within the business section of Times Online.

Career & Jobs also has an extensive MBA section, with advice on choosing courses, the types of MBA available and what MBA graduates have gone on to achieve. In the “senior executive” section you can watch video clips of top business leaders talking about their own management experiences.

Why look for a job online? Times Online as a whole attracted more than 23.8m unique users in October 2008 (Source: Hitbox).

Click on www.timesonline.co.uk/appointments and you will go straight to Career & Jobs and the accompanying job-search facility.

Click here for the New York Times "About the iPhone FAQ".

A new way to take your news with you on the iPhone and iPod touch.

The NYTimes iPhone application allows you to enjoy the high-quality journalism of The New York Times on your iPhone, wherever you are. Specifically designed to utilize the features and navigation of the iPhone, this application syncs and downloads the latest news directly to the device.

Compatible with the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod touch with operating system version 2.0.

Enjoy features such as:
- Offline reading - access The Times' sections and articles to read on and offline
- Simple navigation - view pictures and articles quickly
- Photo view - browse the news in pictures and link to the related articles
- Customization options - select four favorite sections of The Times for one-touch access.

Faced with rising costs, stagnating public investment, and the current global economic crisis, Europe’s universities have never been more concerned about their financial sustainability, an issue now also high on the political agenda.

EUA, in a report published today, gives an important new insight into how higher education institutions are responding to financial pressures. Based on an in-depth, European-wide study, the report explains that the first step for universities in addressing these challenges is to identify the full costs of their activities for both internal and external purposes. Moving to full costing is thus essential to reinforce their financial sustainability.

The report calls on national governments to recognise the importance of granting autonomy to universities and to assist in the implementation of full costing. The authors also recommend that European funding schemes further simplify and develop their funding rules to meet universities’ needs and hence to strengthen their contribution to the European Higher Education and Research Areas.

This is part of EUA’s ongoing work on financial sustainability. It will be completed by a new study focusing on universities’ diversification of income streams (EUDIS), which is the second step in consolidating higher education institutions’ financial structures in times of global economic turmoil.

Please click here to read more or here to download the full report.

An executive summary can also be downloaded here.

Podcast: getting hired after getting fired November 13, 2008 by Adam Jones

The Best International B-Schools Of 2008 14, November 2008

2008 Rank	2006 Rank	School	Grad. Poll	Corp. Poll	Intellect. Capital	Tuition & Fees1	Pre-MBA Pay ($000)2	Post-MBA Pay ($000)2	Selectivity (%)	Job Offers (%)3	Gen. Mgmt.4	Analysis4	Teaching5	Careers5
1	1	Queen's: Canada	5	1	7	63,896	60.0	85.0	74	67.6	B	B	A	B
2	NA	IE Business School: Spain	1	6	13	65,950	53.0	149.5	29	90.4	A+	A+	A+	A+
3	6	INSEAD: France	4	4	2	78,000	75.0	121.0	NA	88.2	A+	A+	A	A
4	2	Western Ontario (Ivey): Canada	7	2	5	68,805	60.0	85.0	NA	82.8	A	A	A+	A
5	5	London Business School: Britain	3	7	1	78,315	75.0	129.0	NA	96.9	A+	A+	B	A+
6	7	ESADE: Barcelona	8	3	15	70,000	63.0	95.5	45	83.0	A	A	B	A
7	4	IMD: Switzerland	3	9	10	70,068	100.0	152.0	26	92.1	A	A	A+	A+
8	3	Toronto (Rotman): Canada	15	5	3	80,424	50.0	85.0	24	82.4	B	B	B	C
9	8	IESE: Spain	6	13	11	88,600	50.0	114.0	20	89.3	A	A	A	B
10	NA	Oxford (Saïd): Britain	10	10	12	62,000	67.5	115.5	NA	91.0	C	C	B	B

International B-Schools Have Unique Appeal, November 13, 2008

Non-U.S. B-schools differentiate themselves by offering greater intimacy, more humanities, and accelerated programs

Top 30 U.S. Programs

• 1 University of Chicago
• 2 Harvard University
• 3 Northwestern University (Kellogg)
• 4 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
• 5 University of Michigan (Ross)
• 6 Stanford University
• 7 Columbia University
• 8 Duke University (Fuqua)
• 9 MIT (Sloan)
• 10 UC Berkeley (Haas)
• 11 Cornell University (Johnson)
• 12 Dartmouth (Tuck)
• 13 NYU (Stern)
• 14 UCLA (Anderson)
• 15 Indiana University (Kelley)
• 16 University of Virginia (Darden)
• 17 UNC - Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
• 18 Southern Methodist (Cox)
• 19 Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
• 20 University of Notre Dame (Mendoza)
• 21 Texas - Austin
• 22 Brigham Young (Marriott)
• 23 Emory University (Goizueta)
• 24 Yale University
• 25 University of Southern California (Marshall)
• 26 University of Maryland (Smith)
• 27 University of Washington (Foster)
• 28 Washington University (Olin)
• 29 Georgia Tech
• 30 Vanderbilt University (Owen)

Click here for Educase: The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008

Spring 2008 survey of 27,317 freshmen and seniors at 90 four-year institutions

Furthermore:
- Convenience: IT makes doing my course activities more convenient (62.5% agree)
- About 1 in 6 respondents skip classes when the materials are online.
- 85% use social network sites
- 66.1% own internet-enabled phones

Key Findings

Key Findings (PDF, all links are to PDF files)

Abstract

This 2008 ECAR research study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 ECAR studies of students and information technology. The study is based on quantitative data from a spring 2008 survey of 27,317 freshmen and seniors at 90 four-year institutions and eight two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 75 students at four institutions; and analysis of qualitative data from 5,877 written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to studying student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, the 2008 study also includes a special focus on student participation in social networking sites.

IE Business School 3rd Annual Social Responsibility Forum

To hell with the business case for boardroom diversity, November 12, 2008, FT

I worry when people talk about there being a business case – as well as a moral case – for making the workplace fairer.

Reformers who claim that appointing a female director or CEO increases a company’s return on capital by 10 per cent are playing with fire. Not all statistics will be so helpful.

Take a new study called Women in the Boardroom and Their Impact on Governance and Performance, by academics at the University of Queensland and London School of Economics (and flagged by the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog).

Women Gain in Education but Not Power, Study Finds, November 12, 2008, NYT

GENEVA (Reuters) — Women still lag far behind men in top political and decision-making roles, though their access to education and health care is nearly equal, the World Economic Forum said Wednesday.

In its 2008 Global Gender Gap report, the forum, a Swiss research organization, ranked Norway, Finland and Sweden as the countries that have the most equality of the sexes, and Saudi Arabia, Chad and Yemen as having the least.

50 women to watch 2008, WSJ interactive graphic, November 10, 2008

Peter Lorange was former President of IMD in Switzerland.

Extracts:

Tenure, a cornerstone of higher education, is a career-long commitment between the university and the scholar, irrespective of performance. But is the job-for-life system still applicable in the modern business school?

Although I was once a tenured professor at Wharton.. over time I have come to question its value to the point where I can no longer endorse it.

Our modern concept of academic tenure traces its origins to the Middle Ages, when professors justifiably needed guaranteed protection against politicians to ensure academic freedom and self-expression. But that was then.

Today, the pressing business issues that business schools are tackling – whether through research or in the classroom – require cross-disciplinary teams of professors working together, typically with different yet complementary academic backgrounds. This is in opposition to the tenure approach, which primarily calls for individual faculty members to work alone and within clear disciplinary silos in their quest for tenure. Single-authored, refereed journal articles typically represent the safest route to tenure.

The second main reason tenure is undesirable relates to the tenure process itself, which is at best dysfunctional. The peer process of evaluating candidates for tenure is typically subjective, judgmental and highly political. Candidates must “play the game” if they want to be successful. The “safest” route to tenure is to publish single-authored articles in refereed journals. Issues of relevance and broader contribution typically do not enter into the equation. The reviewers make judgmental assessments based on their familiarity with a narrow disciplinary area.

In the end, the process leads to a binary outcome – a yes or a no. Typically, there will be proponents and opponents within the same academic organisation, which can easily lead to fragmentation and polarisation into distinct academic camps. Again, this is in contrast to the team approach, which...

Download this report (136KB) published yesterday.

Financial Times report on Global Legal Education

When I ask my colleagues about the main challenges our schools face today many point at the attraction, development and retention of good faculty as one of the most serious. Indeed, today schools compete to attract those scholars who combine the best credentials in research with solid teaching skills and who also interface with the top management of respected companies. I have sometimes refer to these well-rounded academics as “kangaroos”, as opposed to “gurus”, because the former are able to jump from research to class to consultancy in large corporations, performing excellently in the three facets. Let me now further elaborate on this multifaceted type of academics by opposing two models of faculty, which I will name “Humboldtian Faculty” and “Mavens”.

“Humboldtian Faculty” was moulded at the eponymous institution in Berlin in the early Nineteenth Century and has inspired the model of academic prevalent at all Western universities in the past two hundred years. Wilhelm Von Humboldt believed that, in order to make a significant leap in the sciences and in the humanities, the career of academics should become specialised –until then, university professors may teach different discipline- and universities should be organised in schools and departments. A number of consequences for the academic profession followed over the decades and I summarise some of these features in the chart included below.

The Humboldtian Faculty model has rendered many positive results. Knowledge has experienced an unprecedented advance across the board. At the same time, a significant number of education analysts and scholars have warned about some undesirable effects of the model such as the “silos syndrome” derived from an extreme specialisation and lack of integration of both academics, teachings and research at large.

In addition, the demands from stakeholders, the formidable impact of technologies in the learning process and the origination and distribution of knowledge are transforming the role and the ideal profile of scholars. I believe that the concept of “Maven”, widely popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “The Tipping Point”, can adequately illustrate what is expected from business schools’ professors today. Mavens are active gatherers of new trends, ideas and data and have the key skills of identifying which of them may transform the world.

Furthermore, they exercise the necessary influence to have these ideas diffused through other major opinion makers in society –whom Gladwell calls “connectors” and “vendors”. I include a number of characteristics of faculty as Mavens in the chart below. I hope this idea contributes to a constructive debate on how to better shape the academic profession and adapt it to current changes and demands. I do not believe that I am proposing a revolutionary change, but rather an evolutionary but significant adjustment of the role that faculty play in the modern learning process.

www.SantiagoIniguez.com, Dean of IE Business School
Click here to download the Conference presentation (4.9 MB)

Every other year, the vibrant city of Shanghai becomes the venue of several major management education conferences arranged sequentially in one week. These conferences -organised, respectively, by Antai Business School, EFMD, AACSB and APBS - congregate a good sizeable number of scholars, business school officers and corporate managers, particularly from China and South East Asia.

This year, the Antai Conference –the first of the weekly intense networking events- focused on the social responsibility of business schools and I was invited to speak at the opening session. Normally, when I address issues related to business ethics or social responsibility I try to avoid the overselling of my school. I believe that if I would speak profusely about the different initiatives related to social responsibility at IE Business School I could be compared to those individuals who show off when practicing charitable deeds. In this respect I find pertinent the popular quote from the Gospels that says “when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do”.

Indeed, social responsibility initiatives should not be merchandised as communication or marketing tools by business school representatives. What is decisive is that those initiatives permeate the curriculum and the experience that students learn and live. Actually, students themselves should be the ones who testify if their schools and professors have influenced positively their views and lives. After all, educating is about moulding better persons, good citizens, promoting good habits and behaviour, isn´t it? If the MBA is a transformational experience, and participants learn new knowledge and acquire new skills, they should also be encouraged to improve their ethical attitudes and their business deontology. For those who may be still sceptical about the teaching and the learning of business ethics at business schools, or those who may hold the Freudian thesis that individual ethics is formed in early childhood and unchangeable afterwards, I recommend the classical and stimulating book “Can Ethics Be Taught”.

When I am asked summarily about what is the social responsibility of business schools, like I was at this Shanghai conference, I respond with a simple statement: It is nothing less than preparing leaders, managers & entrepreneurs who transform the world. Interestingly, Francis Estrada, Dean of the Asia Institute of Management in Manila, who made a very interesting presentation after mine, formulated a very similar statement.

My presentation, which you will find in the PDF attached- covered three main challenges that business schools managers have to face if they aim at achieving their social responsibility goals. First, choosing the strategic group that better suits their schools in the global context. Second, the role of business schools in the new knowledge value chain. And thirdly, the ideal profile of the faculty in order to achieve the intended results in the learning process. Many thoughts delivered at the Shanghai conference have been previously shared with the readers of this blog and I thank them for their valuable comments.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lightening of a fire”, a favourite and evocative quote from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats You may disagree with me, but I hope you will acknowledge the passion for education that I try to convey in my addresses.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008