Beyond beauty contests: Benchmarking undergraduate international business education programs according to best practice adoption

• Author: Anthony Seeton,Nicolas M. Dahan,Dante Di Gregorio,Michael Hadani
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/tie.22072
• Date: 01 November 2019
• Published date: 01 November 2019

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Beyond beauty contests: Benchmarking undergraduate

international business education programs according to best

practice adoption

Nicolas M. Dahan

1

| Dante Di Gregorio

1

| Anthony Seeton

2

| Michael Hadani

3

1

College of Business, California State University, Monterey Bay, Seaside, California

2

Fox School of Business, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

3

School of Economics and Business Administration, Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga, California

Correspondence

Nicolas M. Dahan, College of Business, California State University, Monterey Bay, 100 Campus Center, Seaside, CA 93955-8001.

Email: nickdahan@csumb.edu

Business schools are often confronted with a forced

choice between being good and looking good, such that

competition among business schools risk being trans-

formed into a kind of beauty contest. (Gioia & Corley,

2002, p. 109)

1|INTRODUCTION

In 2016, New York Times journalist Frank Bruni wrote an Op Ed enti-

tled “Why College Rankings Are a Joke,”decrying the US News &

World Report (USNWR thereafter) Best Colleges rankings in particular.

He summarizes the main problem thus: “One of the main factors in a

school's rank is how highly officials at peer institutions and

secondary-school guidance counselors esteem it. But they may not

know it well. They're going by its reputation, established in no small

part by previous U.S. news evaluations. A lofty rank perpetuates

itself”(Bruni, 2016). Bruni's comments follow years of criticism of uni-

versity rankings (e.g., Zemsky, 2008), yet evidence indicates that rank-

ing systems continue to draw close attention from university

administrators seeking to compare their own programs to peer

schools to drive resource allocation and curricular design decisions

(Espeland & Sauder, 2007). As Rubin and Morgeson (2015) concluded,

business schools need a “quality rating”system of their programs, “not

a media ranking system.”In the present piece we will argue that aca-

demic programs in international business suffer from the same predic-

ament as general business programs, namely a lack of tools for the

comparative assessment of academic program features and quality. In

the United States, the only existing ranking for undergraduate IB

programs is produced by USNWR, which is based entirely on peer

assessment without defining any set of specific criteria. This method-

ology has led to puzzling results in the past, including top 10 rankings

in undergraduate international business for schools that do not offer

any identifiable IB program, such as the University of Southern

California-Marshall School of Business and University of Michigan-

Ross Marshall School of Business.

1

By “IB program”we mean a

sequence of required undergraduate courses (sometimes paired with

other requirements such as language proficiency or an experience

abroad) leading to some sort of official designation (such as IB major,

minor, concentration, track, or certificate) in international business as

part of a bachelor's degree.

We will propose an alternative program assessment method rele-

vant to international business education, based on publicly available

data that can be collected regularly and allows for apple-to-apple

comparison of IB programs. We produce summary statistics on eight

curricular features for a sample of 74 schools, including all programs

ranked in IB by USNWR, as well as awardees of U.S. federal Center

for International Business Education (CIBE) grants, members of the

Consortium for Undergraduate International Business Education

(CUIBE), and non-U.S. members of the Network of International Busi-

ness Schools (NIBS). We also conducted a cluster analysis of our sam-

ple, which offers a clear contrast in terms of program design

approaches, especially between U.S. schools and non-U.S. schools.

We contend that our proposed methodology is a first step in moving

away from an IB program ranking system toward a quality rating sys-

tem. This methodology can be used by school administrators to

benchmark their IB program against their peers, identify best prac-

tices, and continuously improve their curriculum in order to increase

student and employer satisfaction. Additionally, our study implies that

DOI: 10.1002/tie.22072

Thunderbird Int. Bus. Rev. 2019;61:961–975. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tie © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 961