The College Core: Why A Valuable Curricular Component Can Be A Challenge To The Provision Of Services That Enhance School Of Business Student Outcomes

Abstract

Out-of-class faculty services, such as advising, career advice, and lecture series, stimulate student interest, retention, and graduation rates. Through modeling the interrelationships between the allocation of faculty lines and a college's general education core requirements, its impact on the provision of out-of-class faculty services is explored. The results indicate that a professional school’s undergraduate students will have less access to these services relative to their liberal arts peers. In addition, data envelopment analysis is applied to support the notion that the higher satisfaction often expressed by liberal arts students is not necessarily an accurate indicator of the relative quality of the services being provided by the various schools of the college but rather the resources dedicated to the provision of faculty out-of-class services.