2016 Annual Report
Contents Looking Back 2013-16 Key Strategic Initiatives Results
02-03 04-07
Going Forward
Higher Education Landscape
Key Strategic Initiatives
09 10-13
Undergraduate Programs Non-traditional Students
Development and Alumni Relations
Corporate Partnerships
Continuing Initiatives
14
Highlights
15-16
Key Statistics
17-18
Looking Back We had much to celebrate in 2016 at the College of Business. Most importantly, we celebrated the Bloomberg Businessweek rankings naming our College as the 15th-best public undergraduate business program, the opening of the much needed Phil and Pat Muck Business Annex, and the 50th anniversary of the first and best Master of Sports Administration program. As we complete our new 2017-2020 College strategic plan this semester, it is useful and interesting to go back and review our previous 2013-2016 plan that was developed by all of us who were at the College at that time.
2013-2016 Key Strategic Initiatives Enhance Athens Based Student Undergraduate Learning Experience The College’s most important initiative focused on more clearly defining and improving our transformational learning experiences for our residential, Athens based undergraduate students. With employer expectations constantly changing, it was our job to stay relevant and empower our students with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in their careers. In addition, universities and colleges have been increasingly scrutinized by parents, government, and other stakeholders about the value of higher education. Therefore, our goals were to revise the College’s core curriculum, increase the number of applied learning opportunities through our Centers of Excellence and Selective Programs, and build an integrated career management program. One important external measure for the College’s performance is the Bloomberg Businessweek rankings of undergraduate business schools because student outcomes and employer assessments of our students are the primary variables used in the rankings. If the College was successful in enhancing the undergraduate experience, then critical student outcomes such as placement rates, average starting salaries, and employer satisfaction with our students’ career preparedness should improve. The College has traditionally been ranked in the Top 75 business schools and in the Top 50 of public schools. At the beginning of the 2013-2016 strategic plan, we set a goal of becoming a Top 25 Public Business School.
02
2013-2016 Key Strategic Initiatives (continued) Develop a More Sustainable Financial Business Model Our second major initiative concerned developing a more sustainable financial business model. We would start with increasing undergraduate and graduate enrollment. In 2013, our goal was to enroll 700-750 graduate students and 2,400 undergraduate students. To achieve this goal, we increased our investment in marketing and communication efforts. Under the supervision of Jessica Gardner, we decided to focus our marketing efforts on the high-touch relationships and applied experiences that we offer to differentiate our students’ experience. Jess was asked to develop a comprehensive recruitment campaign that included digital marketing and the development of high-touch yield events that were supported by faculty members and chairs who met with incoming students. In addition, the long-term financial stability of the College depends heavily on development and advancement initiatives. During the Promise Lives University Capital Campaign, the College was given a $20 million fund raising goal.
03
Results As the result of the efforts of our outstanding faculty, professional staff, and the leadership of the associate deans, department chairs and center directors, every major goal was met and exceeded. Below is a list of some of our major accomplishments:
Athens Based Student Undergraduate Learning Experience By any measure, 2016 was an incredible year for the College of Business. Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Ohio University’s College of Business as the 38th-best undergraduate business school and 15th-best amongst public universities. The College achieved this ranking through a significant increase in the number of professional development, high-touch mentoring, coaching, and applied learning opportunities provided to students. Significant growth was seen within our traditional academic departments and six Centers of Excellence. At the start of the new 2016-17 academic year we had already scheduled the incredible number of more than 200 college events, which included national speakers, professional development workshops, conferences, and recruiting events. The following are just a few examples:
Ralph and Luci Schey Sales Centre
Center for Entrepreneurship
The Ralph and Luci Schey Sales Centre, under Adam Rapp’s direction, has doubled the number of sales candidates to 400 while increasing selectivity and obtaining more than fifty corporate sponsors.
Under the direction of Luke Pittaway, the Center for Entrepreneurship hosts an incredible array of speakers, venture cafés, and startup weekends. They have also created a nationally recognized interdisciplinary certificate program involving courses that reach students throughout the University. A very exciting initiative is the creation of a C-Suite program that will be housed in a newly renovated space inside the Central Classroom building on Union Street (to be completed in fall 2017).
Robert D. Walter Center for Strategic Leadership Tim Reynolds has greatly strengthened and expanded the center’s student leadership programs and has facilitated incredible placements of their graduates. Tammy Reynolds has developed the highly successful Emerging Leaders Program and Women in Business.
04
Consumer Research Center
Sports Administration
The Consumer Research Center, under the direction of Dan Dahlen and with the research project oversight from Alexa Fox and Jacob Hiler, has been completing first class consumer research projects for major corporations including Kellogg’s, Smucker’s, Grange Insurance, Wendy’s, and Dairy Queen.
The Department of Sports Administration, under the direction of Norm O’Reilly, has created a senior undergraduate capstone consulting experience for students working with nationally recognized companies in several cities.
Business Cluster
Business Core
The Business Cluster faculty have done an incredible job working together to revise our signature Cluster program. Overall, they have provided a more consistent, rigorous and high impact experience for our students.
Associate Dean Chris Moberg has facilitated the revision of our Business Core by adding an integrated freshmen experience, improving our focus on written communication competence, and making changes in terms of total credits and prerequisites to help our students graduate within four years.
05
Career Management We took several years to carefully research the best practices at our competitor schools and to build up the necessary investment dollars. One of the steps we took to develop the investment funds was to reorganize our administrative support. The Shared Services group is doing an outstanding job of providing support to the faculty. Julie Howard, Kim Foreman, Amy Toth, and Stephanie Howell are energetic and a pleasure to work with. Today, we have a national, best-in-class integrated career management program for our undergraduate students. We were very fortunate to recruit an incredibly energetic, talented, and experienced career management director, Jennifer Murphy. It is very exciting to see how quickly this new group of talented and enthusiastic professionals has come together to create this successful and critical effort. And now we are extending this service to our Athens and Dublin based master’s programs.
06
Results (continued) College Financial Business Model Our high-touch recruitment and yield marketing efforts greatly increased our enrollment numbers. We increased the number of enrolled graduate students from 600 to more than 1,000 students. Our undergraduate enrollment also increased from 2,200 to 2,800 students. As a result of the growth in enrollments, the financial budget for the College has more than doubled. We also exceeded our $20 million campaign goal. As of 2016, we have secured more than $30 million in gifts and pledges for the College of Business.
College Facilities We received a transformational gift, which has allowed us to acquire and renovate the former Computer Services Center. The Phil and Pat Muck Business Annex has provided us with a much needed three additional floors of classrooms, student breakout rooms, and faculty offices. In addition, we secured a future building site for the College–the former and abandoned PSAC building. This site is now construction ready and will eventually become the front entrance to the College.
Going Forward We will soon complete the College’s next four-year strategic plan, covering the period of 2017-2020. This effort is being facilitated by Luke Pittaway and Norm O’Reilly. Luke and Norm, along with the task force, have spent much time consulting with all of our major stakeholders and completing a thorough environmental scan. The following are three key trends that I believe are the most important to consider as we finalize the new strategic plan.
Higher Education Landscape 2017-2020 As we have discussed in the past, I believe that history will record the 20082010 recession as a major inflection point for many dimensions of the U.S. economy and society. For higher education, this period marked an acceleration of the trends that were happening with regard to a decline in the number of traditional residential students, the continuing lack of state government support for public education, and the demand for higher education institutions to have greater accountability in outcomes achieved for graduates. As a result of that trend, we have seen an increasing segmentation between business colleges that have growing financial resources and those that are experiencing continued declines. Schools located in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Virginia, and Michigan are examples of states that are seeing a decline in state support, and many schools are facing flat or declining enrollments.
The impact of these trends include the following: • Increasing competition for students among all institutions of higher education, within and across state boundaries. The old days of universities accepting implicit, established service regions are gone. • Continued demographic trend of decreasing high school graduates in the state of Ohio for the next 8 to 10 years. This will continue to put pressure on residential enrollments. • We expect that the new Ohio College Plus program will reduce enrollments in the University’s larger introduction freshman and sophomore classes. An increasing number of high school students are taking college courses in their junior and senior high school years at a very low cost. • Ohio state legislature passed an Affordability and Efficiency bill, which mandates that all public universities will reduce the cost of tuition to their students over the next five years.
09
Key Strategic Initiatives for the Future Below are four of the most critical strategic initiatives that I will focus on in the immediate future.
Improve Athens Based Undergraduate Residential Program Our foundation and focus is, and will continue to be, on our Athens undergraduate residential program. It is clear from our seniors’ evaluation of their four-year experiences that we have developed a transformational, studentcentered learning experience. However, what the economy wants from our students in constantly changing. Knowledge and technology continue to grow exponentially. It is now projected that the technology platform is being replaced every five to seven years. As a result, in a recent article that John Keifer shared from Wharton, the projection was that up to 47 percent of the current white and blue collar jobs in developed nations will disappear. Few organizations are prepared for these dramatic changes. Perhaps we should start labeling certain classes as “must be used by x date.� Jeffrey Selingo reviews the recent criticisms of higher education in his book titled There is Life After College (2016). He and many others identify content as being less important than skills, such as problem solving and the ability to self-direct your own learning. He explains that to develop these skills in our students there is an increasing need for faculty and staff to cultivate relationships and mentor students to help them develop these skills through research projects and applied experiences. I believe there are three principles that we need to continue to emphasize to create the proper learning environment for our students: 1.
Learning
2.
Relationships
3.
Improvement
10
Learning Matters Student learning needs to continue to be our priority, and this requires that we support and encourage all of our faculty and professional staff to continue to learn so we can help our students learn what is most relevant and important.
Relationships Matter Relationships, especially on a residential campus, are essential to the undergraduate experience. This has been continually verified by research going back to the late 1980s on what makes an effective learning environment. Student success, in terms of retention, academic success and involvement in their jobs upon graduation, is highly related to the extent that students feel that their faculty and staff care and are involved in their academic success.
Improvement Matters Assessment of learning and investigation and adoption of best practices where appropriate is an on-going practice of every successful institution. (Adapted from Felton, et al. (2016) The Undergraduate Experience: Focusing Institutions on What Matters Most.)
11
Key Strategic Initiatives (continued) Expand Offerings for Non-traditional Students Currently, 80 percent of the enrolled students in higher education are not attending a four-year, full-time, residential university. This is mainly because of expense and older aged adults realizing that they need collegelevel education to improve the quality of their lives. In addition, one of the implications of the exponential growth in knowledge is that people need to continue their learning after a four-year degree. Many observers suggest that the amount that professionals will need to learn subsequent to graduation is many times more than what they learned in their four-year bachelor’s degree. We have the opportunity to develop more professional master’s degrees and continuing education programs to serve this segment. We are also planning on developing pilot programs with stackable certificates and a degree completion program. This is an important financial diversification strategy for our College and an important way for us to develop stronger corporate partnerships. These efforts will be led by Heather Lawrence, academic director of Graduate Programs, and Kari Lehman, administrative director of Graduate Programs and Executive Education.
Cultivate Relationships with Young Alumni The focus of our efforts in advancement is being redirected. The College and University have a need to develop a much larger base of engaged younger alums. The University has seen a significant growth of graduates since the 1980s and we have the opportunity to cultivate a much larger pipeline of successful alumni. These are people currently in their mid-30s to 50s in age. As they progress in their lives, careers, and raising children, it is our hope that they will want to give back to the College when they enter into their 60s. We need to develop an integrated and lifetime strategy of alumni relations and development. Our objective is to increase our annual fund, raising from the current $1.5-2.0 level to $4-5 million (not including transformational gifts).
12
Key Strategic Initiatives (continued) Strengthen Corporate Relationships and Partnerships As a professional business college we need to continue to increase our engagement with the profession. This will help us to ensure that we deliver the learning outcomes desired for our students. Also, this engagement can help to inform our research so we remain relevant. Secondly, developing continuing education programs in partnership with corporations is an additional revenue source and enhances our reputation. As mentioned, these will include stackable certificates, additional professional graduate degrees, and a degree completion pilot program that will be offered to qualified corporate employees.
Continuing Initiatives Meet New AACSB Accreditation Standards Our next re-accreditation visit will occur in the winter of 2019. As we discussed, the new 2013 standards focus on innovation, engagement, and impact. Because it represents such a significant shift, AACSB is allowing time for business schools to adjust. However, in 2017 we are required to have made demonstrable strides in meeting the new standards. The key issue that we need to begin to address is the impact and relevance of our research. We need to have a plan in place this year.
Advancing Diversity Efforts Last year we hired Noel Levitz to do a quick study on our College’s diversity efforts. They concluded that we were successfully generating multicultural leads but we should be more focused on converting those existing leads to enrolled students. As a result, we hired a full-time Assistant Director of Diversity and Inclusion, Ebony Porter, to work on yield activities and retention of enrolled multicultural students. We will continue the Junior Executive Business Program but that will be a small part of Ebony’s overall responsibilities as she also focuses on broader diversity efforts. As a result of Luke Pittaway’s initial work, we applied for and will become the host of a large program called Ohio Business Week. This is a one-week summer entrepreneurship program that is funded by a private foundation and attracts more than 150 students of whom 65-70 percent are female or multicultural students. We will host this program in the beginning of this summer on our campus.
14
Highlights
Bloomberg Businessweek Ranking
Inaugural Business Olympics
Bloomberg Businessweek ranked OHIO’s
The College of Business hosted 500 freshmen
College of Business as the 15th-best public
at the inaugural Business Olympics. Through
undergraduate business school and 38th-
interactive team games, this event created
best overall. This extensive ranking is based
comradery within the Class of 2020 and
on student outcomes, student evaluations
challenged the students to apply the skills
of their academic experiences, and employer
they’ve learned during their first semester as
evaluations of our students.
Business Bobcats.
Schey Sales Centre Success
Celebrating 50 Years
The Ralph and Luci Schey Sales Centre
The Department of Sports Administration is
welcomed 138 new hires this fall semester;
celebrating its 50th anniversary and OHIO’s
their largest class to date. The Centre
sports programs continue to rank first in
also hosted it’s largest career fair with
the world. The MSA and Professional MSA
460 Business Bobcats and partners as
programs were named the best postgraduate
well as celebrated their 19th Annual Sales
and online sports courses by SportBusiness
Symposium.
International.
15
Highlights
The Phil and Pat Muck Business Annex On September 30, 2016, the College of Business celebrated the opening of the Phil and Pat Muck Business Annex and acknowledged the generosity of the donors who made the renovation of this building possible. Through the newly renovated building, Phil and Pat Muck have supported the growth of our College and enabled us to provide exceptional student-centered learning experiences.
Growth in Graduate Programs
Ohio Business Week
This fall, more than 1,000 graduate students
The College of Business will be hosting Ohio
enrolled in the College of Business, and
Business Week on the Athens Campus from
graduate enrollment now accounts for nearly
July 16-22. During OBW, current high school
40 percent of the College’s tuition revenue.
students will prepare for college and learn
Through on-campus events and residencies,
business and entrepreneurship skills through
such as the Online MBA Leadership
applied learning experiences. Historically,
Development Program, we continue to provide
65 percent of the 150 to 200 attendees are
high-touch experiences for graduate students
female and multicultural.
in our residential and online programs.
16
Key Statistics Enrollments 3,789 3,489 3,084
2,615
2,759
2,890
353
487
616
2,262
2,272
2,274
2,314
2011
2012
2013
2014
1,021 920
770
2,569
2015
2,768
2016
First-Year Retention
89% 87% 86%
86% 85%
2010-2011
2011-2012
2012-2013
17
2013-2014
2014-2015
Key Statistics (continued) Placement Rates
90%
95%
93%
70%
70%
73%
71%
2012
2013
2014
2015
88%
90%
83%
At Graduation
2016
3 Mos. Following Graduation
One of our career management objectives was to increase our graduates’ response rate to our commencement survey. The acceptable response rate from our competitive business schools is 45-50 percent. Thanks to the efforts of our Office of Career Management, our response rate in 2015 was 89 percent and was 97 percent in 2016. This makes our argument that we care about all of our students very clear.
18
1 Ohio University, Copeland Hall 614, Athens, Ohio 45701 740.593.2002 | business.ohio.edu