Conclusion

This book was conceived, written and edited with the aim of providing educators across the world with a selection of some innovative solutions to the challenges that face business school teaching. In concluding this work, we begin by making the observation that our interaction with academics working at the forefront of contemporary business education has confirmed our suspicion that the challenges we face are common internationally. All our authors struggle with the changing nature of the tertiary education sector. Universities are becoming more market driven. Business schools in particular are exemplars of this trend, as evidenced in Khurana’s (2010) sweeping and comprehensive analysis of the history of business school education. State support for higher-level education is diminishing in most jurisdictions, in some cases quite severely. To survive, universities must offer more courses to more students. The advent of funding models that increasingly place the financial burden on students is significantly altering the traditional relationship between academics and courses, students and the institution. Course design has always been a contentious issue for academics seeking to maintain a balance between academic rigor and professional relevance. Competing positions on curriculum design will undoubtedly wax and wane for as long as universities exist, but, at the moment, the changing model of university funding and the necessity of attracting fee-paying students are subtly rebalancing the weighting in favor of professional relevance. Students who pay fees for their education see themselves more as customers and less as students. Institutions are now expecting teaching staff to take on greater administrative loads and drive the development of new courses. All these changes are occurring in an environment that employs, retains and promotes academic staff primarily on the basis of research outputs.