Business Schools Increasingly Incorporate Sustainability

An increasing number of business schools are offering courses in ethics, corporate social responsibility, or environmental sustainability, concludes the biennial report Beyond Grey Pinstripes, which surveys the extent to which business schools incorporate sustainability concerns into curriculum. The report was released jointly by World Resources Institute and the Aspen Institute.

Stanford University’s MBA program tops the list this year, distinguishing itself not only by offering a large number of courses, but also by the relatively large proportion of students who attended those classes.

“To be competitive, corporations need to recast social and environmental problems as business growth opportunities,” said Jonathan Lash, president of World Resources Institute. “These schools are leading the way in providing students with the skills that are becoming increasingly valuable to business – bottom line, including searching for innovative technologies and entrepreneurship opportunities around climate change, water scarcity, labor issues, and poverty alleviation.”

In the survey, changes in coursework proved noticeable. Of the 91 business schools surveyed on six continents, 54 percent require a course in ethics, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, or business and society, up from 45 percent in 2003 and 34 percent in 2001. Additionally, the report finds that some leading schools are launching innovative courses on such topics as exploring private sector approaches for addressing problems in low income markets.

As a clear indication of the importance of these issues globally, three of the top five ranked schools, and 12 of the top 30, are located outside the United States.

Although the business schools surveyed are making important progress, the report’s authors note that teaching and research on these topics often remain limited to disconnected pockets of innovation. While students at schools ranked in the top 30 were exposed to ethical, social, and environmental issues in an average of 25 percent of their required course work, other students saw these issues only 8 percent of the time. Only 4 percent of faculty at the surveyed schools published research on related issues in top, peer-reviewed journals during the survey period.

“MBA programs still have a silo mentality when it comes to teaching business ethics as well as social and environmental stewardship,” added Judith Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program. “For MBA students to be truly prepared for the challenges they will face as executives after graduation, these topics need to be integrated across the business-school curriculum and in other required courses such as accounting, economics, finance, information technology, marketing, operations, and strategy.”

The Beyond Grey Pinstripes report identified the Top 30 MBA programs by inviting nearly 600 MBA programs to report on their course work and research; 1,842 courses and 828 journal articles from leading peer-reviewed business publications were analyzed.

The top 30 programs as ranked by Beyond Grey Pinstripes are:

1. Stanford, USA
2. ESADE, Spain
3. York (Schulich), Canada
4. ITESM, Mexico
5. Notre Dame (Mendoza), USA
6. George Washington, USA
7. Michigan (Ross), USA
8. North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler), USA
9. Cornell (Johnson), USA
10. Wake Forest (Babcock), USA
11. UC Berkeley (Haas), USA
12. Nottingham, UK
13. Virginia (Darden), USA
14. Western Ontario (Ivey), Canada
15. Boston College, USA
16. Erasmus (Rotterdam), The Netherlands
17. Colorado (Leeds), USA
18. New Mexico (Anderson), USA
19. Asian Institute of Management (SyCip), The Philippines
20. Portland State, USA
21. Yale, USA
22. McGill, Canada
23. Case Western (Weatherhead), USA
24. INSEAD, France
25. Calgary, Canada
26. Jyvskyl, Finland
27. Navarra (IESE), Spain
28. Wisconsin-Madison, USA
29. Minnesota (Carlson), USA
30. Georgetown (McDonough), USA

The report is available at www.BeyondGreyPinstripes.org