Understanding this, Corporate Knights set out nine years ago to highlight which programs are leading the pack within Canada. We looked south of the border to the Beyond Grey Pinstripes ranking conducted by the Aspen Institute, which had established criteria rewarding schools for emphasizing social responsibility, environmental sustainability and community engagement through institutional support, student initiatives and coursework. Along with the help of an advisory panel of experts, the Knight Schools Ranking was launched.

When Corporate Knights first began ranking Canadian MBA programs in 2003, we received a spectrum of responses from school administrators. Despite pockets of academic enthusiasm, the rising momentum for corporate social responsibility in business circles had yet to appear in the classroom in a systemic manner. Some were pleased to showcase individual programs, while others had little idea what their competitors and colleagues were focusing on. After receiving the survey, one school administrator even exclaimed, “You mean there is stuff (on sustainability) being done out there?” We understood then there was work to do.

The original MBA survey has been broadened to evaluate disciplines not typically associated with the concepts surrounding sustainability, including law schools, teachers colleges, industrial design programs, public policy schools and others. We will return to evaluating these disciplines in future years, but decided in 2012 to narrow the focus to MBA and engineering programs. The Canadian corporations most successful at displaying good corporate citizenship have done so largely due to the vision of the executives running the company. With 63 per cent of the executives for the top 10 TSX-traded companies by market capitalization having earned either an MBA or an engineering degree, determining the efficacy of the education tomorrow’s business leaders are receiving in sustainability became the goal of this year’s survey.

MBA Programs

The results show how polarized business programs remain on the subject of sustainability. Only six MBA programs received a grade above 50 per cent, and these schools were located in four different provinces, showing no regional superiority. The Schulich School of Business at York University earned the top mark of 86 per cent, receiving a high grade in all three evaluated categories that continues a nine-year reign on top of our rankings.

The Master of Environment and Business (MEB) program at the University of Waterloo placed second. We continue to rank the program, despite it not representing a traditional MBA, as it presents the comprehensive fusion of business and environment we wish to encourage. Prominence is given to sustainability from the onset of the program, with students brought in two weeks before classes begin for an orientation that includes seminars on “the business case for sustainability.” The John Molson School of Business at Concordia University placed third, allowing students to specialize in numerous categories: corporate governance and business ethics; business sustainability and environmental management; or community development.

With the United Nations celebrating 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives, we also looked into which MBA programs champion cooperative business management as an alternative to a more traditional business structure. L’Université du Québec à Montréal, which came in seventh overall, was the only faculty presenting a multifaceted approach – offering a specialization in cooperatives and social organizations, emphasizing cooperatives management during orientation activities and maintaining an endowed faculty chair on the subject.

Despite this impressive performance by the top-ranked schools, the average grade for MBA programs remained below 30 per cent. Improvements are needed most in the institutional support and coursework sections. In particular, greater opportunities for students to partake in sustainability-oriented internships and consulting programs are needed; more than 50 per cent of programs failed to provide any. A serious commitment to sustainability also needs to be evident in coursework, as few business schools include sustainability-themed courses in their core curriculum; 34 per cent failed to include any, with another 31 per cent only offering a “professional ethics” course.

Engineering Programs

The survey produced similar divisions among engineering schools, with just eight ranking above 50 per cent. The University of Toronto’s engineering program received the top grade of 72 per cent, powered by a perfect grade in the student participation section and a 96 per cent score for institutional support.

The University of Western Ontario was second, guaranteeing students a number of streams entirely dedicated to social and/or environmental impact management: green process engineering, environmental engineering, and biochemical and environmental engineering, among others. L’Université Laval came third, providing the students with multiple endowed faculty chairs specializing in a variety of topics including materials for renewable energy, modelling for water quality and planning sustainable forest value networks. It also maintains several institutes and research centres that focus on issues related to social and environmental impact management.

One notable addition to the list is the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), which is in the process of expanding its engineering faculty to keep up with the extensive economic development and resource extraction efforts occurring in B.C.’s north. It offers a joint degree in environmental engineering with the University of British Columbia, helping UNBC land an overall ranking of eighth, supported by top marks in both required and elective courses dedicated to social or environmental impact management.

The lack of sustainability education in engineering faculties lies mainly in the coursework and curriculum offered. Students are given few opportunities to focus on pertinent subjects, with only 43 per cent of schools providing relevant specializations. Joint degrees suffer a similar fate, despite their potential for improving the social and environmental sensitivity of the Canadian engineering profession; 70 per cent of schools failed to provide any. The number of mandatory courses is also scant, with just six schools achieving a perfect score in this category by offering at least five relevant and required courses.

Taking the fork in the road

There are hopeful signs that the poorest performing programs in both MBA and engineering programs, which still comprise the majority of faculties in Canada, are growing more comfortable with the notion of sustainability, even if they have not yet moved to integrate theory into their curriculums.

Student initiatives such as Engineers Without Borders, Environmental Chemists and Net Impact not only provide students with experience-based learning, but also demonstrate their overwhelming desire for a change in curriculum. Many professors are engaged in environmental or social research initiatives – despite a lack of significant faculty support – because they understand the underlying trends in the business and engineering communities. They are waiting for a transfer of these resources to formal training, which their respective faculties have yet to do.

We’re waiting, too.

To collect information for the 2012 ranking, surveys were distributed to programs selected for evaluation. If a school did not complete the survey, CK used public information to collect data, unless a specific request for exclusion – made by several MBA schools, including the Richard Ivey School of Business – was received. The survey was used to collect pertinent information within the timeframe of September 2011-August 2012.

Click here to go back to the ranking landing page.

The post A higher degree of sustainability appeared first on Corporate Knights.

—

Click here to go back to the ranking landing page.

The post 2012 Sustainable MBA results appeared first on Corporate Knights.

—

Click here to go back to the ranking landing page

The post 2012 Engineering results appeared first on Corporate Knights.

CK: Our magazine does an annual ranking of MBA schools in Canada by measuring the degree to which sustainability is integrated into their respective curriculums. It’s an insightful, but also challenging exercise given the different approaches schools take. What does the landscape look like in your view?

MILSTEIN: There’s no single standard for what ought to be done. You have standalone programs like Presidio Graduate School or Bainbridge Graduate Institute that focus entirely on sustainable management. You have programs at Michigan, Yale and Duke (with similar approaches), and you’ve got programs like ours and Berkeley’s where you have substantial content in sustainability offered in different ways. There’s a real variety out there.

CK: This must create some confusion, in terms of what both students and faculty are looking for.

MILSTEIN: One of the challenges to the area is that sustainability itself is a term that can have a lot of meanings. The challenge academically for schools that want to develop a program is, do they really know what they want to develop? They can cover labour issues, cleantech, impact investing – there are so many different terminologies now that can apply. And at the end of the day you need faculty members and staff who are going to put programs together. Part of the struggle I’ve watched is people never being clear on what they want a program to focus on.

CK: How would you categorize the approaches or learning opportunities?

MILSTEIN: From our perspective at Cornell, we think the business and sustainability space is divided into three main content areas. (One is) environmental management, where you define sustainability as something more akin to a regulatory problem. You can follow regulations or try to influence regulations as they’re played out. How are (regulations) going to impact your operations, the materials you use and the design of your products? A second area that’s gained a lot of currency in the last 10 years is corporate social responsibility. CSR includes environmental management but also sustainability as public opinion. The third component is what I call sustainability enterprise, and that’s looking at sustainability as a business opportunity. If (the drivers behind sustainability) are a long-lasting and chronic problem, what are the businesses and technologies and products we can commercialize around it? Our program is focused on that last piece, emphasizing sustainable enterprise. Our students want to lead a company, know what to invest in, know what to commercialize. Here you’re focused on business growth opportunities, and that’s very different than many programs focused on ethics or CSR.

CK: So a school and prospective students really need to know what they want their strengths to be.

MILSTEIN: In my mind, most programs have not thought this stuff out, and that’s a problem for the space. The dynamic you end up with inside programs is you have a lot of committees, people making decisions about courses, and you’re going to have a group of faculty of different areas weighing in on whether that makes sense for the school.

CK: What’s the job market today for MBA graduates drawn to the business of sustainability?

MILSTEIN: There are plenty of jobs for folks in the environmental management domain, but our MBAs don’t want those. There are probably not enough CSR jobs in the world to satisfy the demand of our business graduate students. Sustainable enterprise jobs are a little bit trickier. Sometimes it means you’re just going after a normal straight-line job, but we’ve armed our students with a deeper knowledge of what those sustainable opportunities are. A lot of our graduates end up taking straight-line jobs in consulting or Wall Street or consumer products firms. They’re getting into those roles and applying a different lens to problems and building solutions that will tap into sustainability without making it a front-and-centre goal of what they’re trying to accomplish.

CK: Should sustainability continue to be its own silo within the MBA curriculum or more broadly integrated across entire MBA programs?

MILSTEIN: If you go back 20 years, people were arguing it’s a complex multidisciplinary subject and you can’t compartmentalize it; that it has to be diffused among everything. Getting that in practice has been tricky. What’s the right answer? We have this debate internally. Must you have sustainability in the core? On the one hand, I say, it would make a lot of sense to have a sustainability course in the core. Then again, I don’t want it as its own standalone subject and I want to integrate it across all the courses. I think it’s about thinking through how a program is structured, what students want to do, what kind of decisions do they want to participate in, and how do we make sure we’ve prepared them for that. What we’re saying is we shouldn’t be graduating anybody from the Cornell program who doesn’t have a fundamental understanding of what the sustainability domain looks like, what their options are, and how they can move forward on different decisions.

CK: Are more students seeking sustainability in their business school studies? Are there a growing number of applicants in this area?

MILSTEIN: I don’t have enough information to say conclusively across the board there’s growth. I know what’s going on in our school. In 2004 we had only a handful of students. Now we grapple with the fact that half our (business school) applicants are citing our program as the reason they applied to Cornell. That’s pretty big growth for us. When I talk to colleagues, they tell me those are big numbers for a program or content area.

CK: Is the growing interest a generational thing?

MILSTEIN: Look at the trend. The millennials are coming up. Those students coming to our programs, on average 27 or 28 years old, have been socialized on social and environmental issues from a very early age in a way we never were. They are more involved in some ways – volunteering is something they grew up with. Environmental consciousness is something they grew up with. There is a shift in the interests that students have. Now, we have no lack of people who want to get an MBA and just go to Wall Street and make as much money as they can. But increasingly there are people who are concerned about social issues, concerned about environmental issues, and believe the private sector should have a role to play in addressing these issues. That’s a trend that’s growing and it’s not going to go away anytime soon. There are not good, viable solutions to how we sort out growing to a population of nine billion or more, and supporting a population of that size. We’re seeing it even now from the NGO community. They are turning to entities like us, turning to our students, and explaining how they’ve been working on these problems for decades and things are only getting worse; that they’d like to work increasingly with the private sector.

CK: So more students want their livelihood to be a reflection of who they are and the values they hold?

MILSTEIN: People want to demonstrate they work for places that care and are involved. When we walk into an interview room now, people (applicants) are asking us questions about social problems, how we can reconcile products in the marketplace with these other problems we face. It is something companies themselves recognize has come to their doorstep in a large way, which is a big contrast to about eight years ago. HR people eight years ago said sustainability is important but what does it have to do with HR? Now they say it’s important to them – if companies don’t demonstrate they’re good corporate citizens they can lose strong candidates right off the bat.

Click here to go back to the ranking landing page.

The post Green thinking picking up steam in MBA programs appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The first CK Knight Schools report was in 2003, with the objective “…to shine a light on individuals in business schools across Canada who are working to push the social responsibility, environmentally sustainable and community engagement agendas forward.” Nine reports have been completed to date, all of which produce a ranking of university programs according to how well they integrate sustainability into their ucrriculum and educational atmosphere. Analysis of MBA degree programs remain central to the ranking, but over the years many degree programs (and disciplines) have been evaluated, including: law, engineering, urban planning, architecture, journalism, public policy and public administration, industrial design, teacher’s education, and actuarial science. This year, in the 9th Knight Schools Ranking, we focus on MBA business programs, along with undergraduate Engineering programs.

Research Methodology

The Knights Schools methodology is based on the Beyond Grey Pinstripes Report, which is published every two years by the Aspen Institute. The institutes evaluate MBA programs across the globe for social, ethical and environmental stewardship using two metrics: required and elective courses, and faculty research. CK has taken this methodology and expanded it in a number of ways. First, we evaluate MBA business programs, as we believe it is critical to root ideas of sustainability within students, future managers, at the start of their training. We also evaluated student-led initiatives on top of the two metrics used, as initial research told us taht this is a hotbed of innovation and sustainability activities. This is where we started in 2003, evaluating programs under four broad categories: Institutional (25%), Faculty Research (20%), Student-Led Initiaties (15%) and Course Work (40%).

Fast-forward to the 2012 Knight Schools ranking. Each year, slight modifications were made to improve and streamline our analysis. In a broad sense, the main difference from 2003 is that programs were evaluated in three categories, as ‘faculty research’ evaluation was integrated into ‘institutional’. Within each category, changes to weighting and normalization methodology were made, detailed below.

Data Collection

To collect information, a survey designed by CK was distributed to programs selected for evaluation. Faculty members were given a month to complete the Knight Schools survey. If a school did not complete a survey, CK used public information, such as the university’s website, to collect data unless exclusion from the ranking was specifically requested. The survey is used to collect data within the timeframe of September 2011 – August 2012.

The survey was designed to evaluate three sectors wtihin an academic program environment:

1. “Institutional support” considers if the faculties are doing their part to encourage sustainability through external guest speakers and events, orientation activities, internships and consulting programs, loan forgiveness and scholarships, student competitions, faculty-led community involvement, endowed faculty chairs, institutes and centers, faculty research and ‘other’ programs or activities.

2. “Student-led initiatives” evaluates how sustainability is fostered outside teh classroom by the student body in the form of clubs, groups and events.

3. “Coursework” clarifies how and if sustainability is integrated into the curriculum of the program by looking at required and elective courses (fully dedicated to sustainability concepts and/or partially dedicated), joint degrees, and degree specializations available.

Data Analysis

Once data was collected via the survey for each program, it was analyzed by a team of CK researchers and evaluated for “sustainability” content. If a school or program completed the survey and returned it to CK, researchers would fact-check the data presented against that which is publicly available (i.e. university and program websites). Clarification emails to the program of contact were sent if necessary. With the use of Excel, score for each question were inputted into a spreadsheet and final scores for each program were calculated based on the 2011 points and weighting scheme.

Standard operating procedures for numerical evaluation of survey information developed in 2009 were strictly adhered to. An example of this evaluation procedure is as follows. For question 1, external speakers and events, data submitted by schools or collated by CK researchers typically consisted of a list of speakers, with the title, date, location, and brief description of the presentation. CK staff assessed the speaking engagement under the following criteria: speakers had to be external to the university, present at a time during the ranking time frame (September 2011-August 2012), the presentation had to be sponsored in part or whole by the faculty, the speaker must lecture on a subject directly related to social, environmental, or sustainability issues, and the session or event must be accessible to the majority of students in the program. If all criteria were met, one point was allocated for the relevant external speaker presentation. Speaking engagements listed under question 1 were evaluated until the maximum number of points (cap) was reached to obtain a perfect score for that question.

Methodology and analysis challenges

Quantification of “sustainability integration” into education is very challenging and requires the paring down of an abstract term to definable categories (i.e. institutional support, student-led initiatives, coursework), which need to be defined by measurable quantities (survey questions, i.e. the number of external speakers invited to lecture on sustainability to students as a metric of institutional support). Therefore, the design of the survey and questions asked has a significant impact on the ranking results. Over time, CK has adjusted and modified the Knight Schools survey in attempts to create an accurate as possible assessment of sustainability integration in education, basing survey design on an established method (Beyond Grey Pinstripes Report).

The distribution of the survey to selected schools and response rate is a second point of influence in the research methodology. Schools were contacted with details of the ranking and faculty members were given a month to complete the Knight Schools survey. If a school did not complete a survey, CK used public information, such as the university’s website, to collect data unless exclusion from the ranking was specifically requested. The lack of response from a school may influence the ranking outcome, but given that program websites are the primary source of information for incoming and future students, all survey information should be available online.

Finally, the most significant impact on the ranking result would be the design of the normalization scheme, or where information in a survey question is translated into a number, which is then weighted to produce a final ranking score. The cap or maximum number of points allocated per question or metric to achieve 100% certainly influences the final outcome. However, this effected all evaluated programs in the same way and is intentional.

Despite the potential limitations above, there are many benefits to producing a ranking in this manner. Quantifying the concept of sustainability puts an abstract concept in more concrete terms, which then allows one to track progress numerically over time. Numerical ranking also allows for direct comparison between things, such as programs, which is useful for benchmarking and evaluating sustainability success between programs at home and abroad.

Corporate Knights Notice and Disclaimer

This document and all of the information contained in it, including without limitation all text, data, graphs, charts (collectively, the “Information”) is the property of Corporate Knights Inc. known herein as “Corporate Knights” and is provided for informational purposes only. The Information may not be modified, reverse-engineered, reproduced or redisseminated in whole or in part without prior written permission from Corporate Knights.

The Information may not be used to create indexes, databases, risk models, analytics, software, or in connection with the issuing, offering, sponsoring, managing or marketing of any securities, portfolios, financial products or other investment vehicles utilizing or based on, linked to, tracking or otherwise derived from the Information or any other Corporate Knights data, information, products or services.

The user of the Information assumes the entire risk of any use it may make or permit to be made of the Information. CORPORATE KNIGHTS DOES NOT MAKE ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR REPRESENTATIONS WITH RESPECT TO THE INFORMATION (OR THE RESULTS TO BE OBTAINED BY THE USE THEREOF).

Information containing any historical information, data or analysis should not be taken as an indication or guarantee of any future performance, analysis, forecast or prediction. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
None of the Information constitutes an offer to sell (or a solicitation of an offer to buy), any security, financial product or other investment vehicle or any trading strategy.

The Information may contain back tested data. Back-tested performance is not actual performance, but is hypothetical. There are frequently material differences between back tested performance results and actual results subsequently achieved by any investment strategy.

Constituents of Corporate Knights equity indexes or stock lists are listed companies, which are included in or excluded from the indexes or lists according to the application of the relevant methodologies. Accordingly, constituents in Corporate Knights equity indexes or lists may include Corporate Knights, clients of Corporate Knights or suppliers to Corporate Knights. Inclusion of a security within a Corporate Knights index or list is not a recommendation by Corporate Knights to buy, sell, or hold such security, nor is it considered to be investment advice.

Corporate Knights receives compensation in connection with licensing its indexes to third parties. Corporate Knights Inc.’s revenue includes fees based on assets in Index Linked Investments.
Any use of or access to products, services or information of Corporate Knights requires a license from Corporate Knights. Corporate Knights brands and product names are the trademarks, service marks, or registered trademarks of Corporate Knights and its subsidiaries in Canada, United States and other jurisdictions.

Click here to go back to the ranking landing page.

The post 2012 Sustainable MBA Methodology appeared first on Corporate Knights.