Without question, the single most important factor affecting undergraduate and graduate enrollments in business and management over the past three decades has been the rising tide of women pursuing degrees in business.

However, special analyses of data from the AACSB "Earned Degrees in Management Education CD-ROM" reveal significant shifts in the enrollment trends of both men and women in management education during the 1990s. During that decade, the so-called great bull market in management education slowed and in some sectors turned bearish. At the undergraduate level, both men and women left business in significant numbers to major in other fields; however, the migration was far greater among men than among women. At the master’s level, while numbers are rising, the gains have been greater for women than for men.

As shown in Table 1, the number of men who earned bachelor’s degrees in business fell by 13 percent between 1992 and 1997, while undergraduate degrees in business awarded to women declined by 7 percent. In contrast, earned degrees at the master’s level increased during this period. However, the number of women earning a master’s degree was more than double the gain posted by men (28 percent for women vs. 11 percent for men).

Table 1

These numerical shifts at the undergraduate and graduate levels also are reflected in the rising proportion of undergraduate and graduate management degrees earned by women: in 1997, women accounted for nearly one-half (49 percent) of undergraduate degrees in business, up from 47 percent in 1992 and just 10.6 percent in 1972. At the graduate level, nearly two-fifths (39 percent) of master’s degrees in business were awarded to women in 1997, from just over one-third (35 percent) in 1992 and a mere 4.9 percent in 1972.

But the aggregated data presented in Table 1 mask important differences across the three sectors of higher education. For example, as shown in Table 2, private for-profit institutions were the big winners during the period 1992-1997, experiencing rising enrollments (as reflected by earned degrees) of both men and women in their undergraduate and master’s programs. In contrast, public institutions experienced significant declines in undergraduate enrollments. At the master’s levels, the gender data presented in Table 2 reveal roughly similar growth rates in both the public and private sectors, but gains that still are well below those posted by for-profit institutions.

Table 2

The data also document how the downturn in undergraduate business degrees cuts across almost all types of institutions, both public and private. The data presented in Table 3 reveal that all sectors experienced declining numbers of men and women in their undergraduate programs during the 1992-1997 period; moreover, the pattern of decline in undergraduate degrees – larger for men than for women – is consistent across almost all sectors, both public and private.

Table 3

The analyses also indicate a consistent pattern across almost all institutional sectors of graduate education: gains for men and women, but much larger gains for women across both public and private institutions (Table 4). Perhaps surprisingly, the data show only modest growth among graduate programs based in research universities: given their national and international reputations, most of these programs easily could expand to meet the rising demand for program seats among their traditional clientele of full-time students. However, the data suggest that, as a group, the best known institutions pursued a "no-growth" or "modest growth" strategy during the ‘90s.

Table 4

In contrast to trends in the prestige institutions, a large portion of the gain in graduate management enrollment originates in new degree programs that target the growing demand from local, working adults. Often these new entrants into the graduate management education market are institutions whose historical missions and academic programs have served a very different clientele than the part-timers who now come to campus (or to remote locations) on evenings and weekends.

What do these numbers mean? First, much as a rising tide of women was responsible for a huge share of the growth in management education during the 1970s and 1980s, so too have women played a critical role in the enrollment shifts affecting undergraduate and graduate programs in the past decade. At the undergraduate level, the migration rate of women out of business has been roughly one-half the rate posted by men in recent years – 7 vs. 13 percent. At the graduate level, the data reveal that women account for roughly two-thirds of the enrollment gain in master’s programs between 1992 and 1997.

Second, easy to infer from these data is that many of the women (and indeed the men) now drawn to both undergraduate and graduate programs are adult learners ¾ "non-traditional" students who represent a significant market for management education. This is a clientele that continues to grow; it also is a clientele that is the clear target of a growing number of educational providers that include for-profit programs that operate in classrooms on traditional and non-traditional campuses, and also in cyberspace via the World Wide Web.

This is among a series of Newsline articles, prepared by Kenneth C. Green, visiting scholar at the Claremont Graduate University, that draws on data from the "Earned Degrees in Management Education, 1992-1997 CD-ROM," which was produced by Green and by JBL Associates for AACSB. The CD provides data for all U.S. institutions that awarded a minimum of 25 undergraduate or graduate degrees in management education between 1992 and 1997. The CD can be ordered using the publication order form in this issue of Newsline or via the AACSB Web site: http://www.aacsb.edu/Publications/cd_degrees.htm