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Dec 13, 2006

Ethics Education Increases At World’s Top-50 Business Schools, According To DePaul University Study

Student Interest in Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Sustainability Grows

From Enron to Hewlett-Packard, corporate scandals have shaken the public’s confidence in business leadership and raised several questions for business schools, including: Where is the ethics education, and are business schools doing their part to teach future executives to be ethical decision-makers?

The answer to these questions can be found in a new study co-authored by Laura Hartman, a management professor and business ethics expert at DePaul University’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, and four academic colleagues: Professors Lisa Jones Christensen and Ellen Peirce of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina; and Professor W. Michael Hoffman and Research Assistant Jamie Carrier of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College.

The research, which will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Business Ethics, is based on extensive surveys of deans and directors from 50 of the world’s top business schools. The academics were asked how their institutions teach business ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and sustainability, which is defined as business practices that help build equitable and ecologically sustainable economies.

Major findings of the study include:

  • Business schools surveyed collectively report a five-fold increase in the number of stand-alone ethics courses in the past eight years. Twenty-five percent of the schools now require that students take a separate course in business ethics.

  • The majority of business schools (84 percent) require that ethics, CSR and/or sustainability be covered in their MBA curricula and one-third require coverage of all three.

  • Sustainability-related courses and immersion programs are a growing trend.

  • Deans report high interest in these topics among students, especially those at the top-10 schools.

  • Sixty-five percent of the schools surveyed said they have academic centers related to ethics, CSR and/or sustainability, indicating long-term institutional support for education and research surrounding these topics beyond classroom requirements.

    “The growing emphasis on ethics at leading business schools mirrors an extraordinary increase in the prominence of ethical challenges in the business environment,” Hartman said. “It is not a question anymore of the chicken or the egg – you simply cannot run a global business, or a leading global business school, today unless you pay attention to these issues,” Hartman said.

    According to the deans polled a key driver of curricular change is student interest in ethics, including student clubs, such as Net Impact, a 120-chapter international student organization devoted to promoting responsible business leadership. “As students demand – and receive – education grounded in a multi-stakeholder, social perspective, they will emerge into the workforce, and soon thereafter in corporate boardrooms, ready to serve as agents of wide-scale change,” Hartman said. “By integrating these subjects through our curricula, we are ensuring that we’re graduating today an entirely different type of student than we graduated a decade ago.”

    The study spotlights several business schools using innovative experiential learning and immersion techniques to teach ethics, CSR and sustainability. Examples include Cornell University business student teams that travel to Senegal and Costa Rica to assist the ecotourism business, and students at IMD in Switzerland who spend a week in Argentina meeting with business, civic and government leaders to learn “how business can make a difference in leading a country forward.” Immersion takes another form at University of Maryland, where business students are required to visit white collar criminals at a minimum security prison to discuss the consequences of business ethics violations. “We note these experiential learning and immersion programs because we hope that they will spark similar acts of creativity and innovation at other business schools,” Hartman said.

    The top 50 business schools polled were identified through the Financial Times 2006 Global MBA ranking of full-time MBA programs. The researchers chose this list because it includes top-rated international business schools. The choice, however, excludes business schools with primarily part-time MBA programs, including Hartman’s own DePaul University. But these programs are also part of the trend of increased investment in ethical teaching, Hartman said. DePaul’s business school, for example, opened its Institute for Business and Professional Ethics in 1985. Directed by one nation’s foremost business ethics scholars, Patricia Werhane, DePaul’s Wicklander Ethics Chair, the center will launch a multi-year lecture and research program in 2007 focusing on the private sector’s role in alleviating poverty globally.

    Editors’ Note: To view the full study, click here: http://newsroom.depaul.edu/news_release/FT_Top50_Analysis_JBE_FINAL.pdf

    Hartman is available for interviews at DePaul 312/362-6569, cell: 312/493-9929 or lhartman@depaul.edu.