As we get to know all the new faces that have joined our community in the last few weeks, I thought this might be a good time to highlight why it is so important that Ross bring together the right mix of faculty and students.
Faculty
We select faculty to come to Michigan first and foremost for their scholarship - their ability to create and disseminate intellectual capital with significant business impact. Their scholarship and participation in international conversations about their specialties is what keeps the Ross community in touch with the latest thinking.
As a group, our faculty is distinguished through its broad-based and diverse strengths across all areas, collaborative culture, and ability to address both theory and practice. No other business school brings all these characteristics together in quite the same way. The outstanding breadth of our faculty and their ideas is widely recognized. Whereas most of our peer schools focus their research strength in a few disciplines, Ross is truly strong across the board and you'll see RSB ranked high in many different disciplines. We also fare well in overall rankings of faculty research - #7 in research by the Financial Times, #10 in the UT Dallas 'Top 100 Business School Research Rankings', and 15th by BusinessWeek. While none of the rankings are perfect, they are nevertheless 'good news' and a nice recognition of the great work our faculty produces year after year.
We are fortunate to have a very diverse group of faculty here at the school in terms of their experience, interests, nationality, and skills. In terms of demographics, we do well in comparison to many of our peer schools. We all continue to face significant challenges, though, especially in terms of women and under-represented minorities. While we have the highest percentage of women on our faculty among the BusinessWeek Top 10 at 24%, the average for the other nine schools is just 18%. We have a very international group, too, with nearly 50% of tenure-track faculty of non-U.S. origin.
Each year, the School puts tremendous effort into building our faculty assets, both through hiring new faculty and also through investing in those that are already here. We are very fortunate to have a large number of very talented senior and junior faculty members joining us during the past year, including John Branch (Marketing and Strategy), Laurie Morgan (Operations and Management Science), Lou Mulligan (Business Law), Ozge Sahin (Operations and Management Science), Jim Westphal (Strategy), Owen Wu (Operations and Management Science), Lu Zhang (Finance) and Minyuan Zhao (Strategy). Of course, we do also lose out on occasion in our battles to retain faculty each year. While we hate to lose, I suppose it would be even more troubling if other schools showed no interest in hiring our faculty. Overall, we are very pleased to have achieved a significant net gain the past few years in terms of both quantity and quality.
Students
With regard to students, we have had another strong year in terms of the profile of our incoming students in our various degree programs - BBA, MAcc, and MBA. Soojin Koh, Director of Admissions and Financial Aid, and her team are already deeply engaged in ensuring that for next year, we build an applicant pool and make admissions decisions consistent with bringing in the right mix of people for what we are trying to achieve.
Naturally, like our peer schools, we look for students with outstanding academic potential. A group of students that has the potential to build the kind of intellectual capital recruiters value in our graduates.
From among these students, though, we want to attract a diverse group that is a great fit for our unique approach. A broad-based, diverse community is essential to the character of our School, the education and leadership development of our students, and to the contribution we make to business and society through our graduates. We simply cannot give all of our students the right kind of educational environment and leadership development experience without a diverse student body in the broadest sense - one with the best possible mix of culture, demographics, experience, interests, nationality, and skills.
So, we will be working hard again to increase our share of the best applicants of all kinds this year, especially women and under-represented minorities. At the school, we'll be hosting prospective student events for both groups, including the Women's Leadership Conference, UpClose Weekend, special receptions at Go Blue Rendezvous for women and consortium admits, Spring Welcome Day for UM undergrad admits, and our summer LEAD program for high school students. We will also be reaching out through targeted email campaigns, our student phonathon, and alumni and faculty outreach matching minority and women representatives of the School with prospective students. We will also be attending National Society of Hispanic MBA's Conference, Fort Forums, and Management Leadership for Tomorrow events.
The School will also continue to offer a broad array of programs and events to ensure that the Business School provides a supportive environment and appropriate professional development for all of our students. Michigan is fortunate to have a set of large and active student organizations such as the Black Business Student's Association, Hispanic-Latin Business Student's Association, and Open for Business, as well as professional development activities and events including the Black Business Student's Association Alumni Conference, Consortium Orientation Program, Women in Leadership Conference, and the Women's Leadership Council Advising & Mentoring. We also have a curriculum that addresses diversity issues from early in the program with Diversity Training during LDP, the OB core course, and electives such as 'Women and Change'.
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