Low admission requirements were undermining the reputation of South African Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degrees, the Council on Higher Education has found.
”Unless programmes take admissions seriously… the standing of the MBA as a master’s degree will be jeopardised in the market,” it says in a special report on the state of MBA provision released on Tuesday.
The report provides details on the council’s decision in May to ”disaccredit” the MBA programmes of 10 business schools for failing to meet minimum standards.
At the time, it gave full accreditation to only seven of the country’s 37 MBA programmes after a two-year review. Fifteen programmes were given conditional accreditation, and 15 lost their accreditation.
The report says institutions had to do better at ascertaining whether prospective students had the knowledge, competency and skills to undertake an MBA.
They also had to boost equity targets and support mechanisms for students from previously disadvantaged groups.
Of the 37 programmes, five were commended for their approach to recruitment, seven met minimum standards, three did not, and 22 required improvement.
In the problem cases, 90% of students were admitted with an NQF Level Six -‒ the equivalent of a three-year diploma at a technical college -‒ ”which does not necessarily include whole qualifications”.
There was often a first-come-first-served approach to admissions, with no limit on the number of students per school, putting a strain on teaching and resources.
These problems were experienced by public and private providers alike. The report says ”superficial, and sometimes opportunistic” approaches to recruitment had serious quality implications.
It cited admission policies that cater for previously disadvantaged students without providing support for them to succeed.
”High drop-out rates undo the equity profile achieved through large intakes of previously disadvantaged students.”
Other concerns included a predominance of part-time non-academic teaching staff, the employment of non-specialist staff to teach specialist courses, insufficient attention to students’ research education, and a skewed demographic profile (mostly white males) of students and staff.
The majority of black student enrolments were in programmes with low fees and low admission criteria.
”Unfortunately… lower admission requirements are usually the introduction to poor quality programmes.”
The majority of MBAs offered in South Africa cost between R20 000 and R59 000 per year.
Student assessment — or exams — should be improved. In many cases, ”the level of assessment is too low for a master’s degree”.
”Modules are assessed through multiple-choice questions which are not at master’s level.”
Some programmes allowed students to fail modules three times, and many study guides tended to spoon-feed students.
”Weak assessment practices question the integrity of the actual qualification awarded and jeopardise the actual teaching and learning process.”
The report expresses concern about a lack of external evaluation or benchmarking for many MBA programmes. The content of specialisations in many cases was ”too thin to actually count as a specialisation”.
It also points out a lack of programme content relevant to the developing world.
”If MBA programmes offered in South Africa are serious in their stated purpose of preparing managers for the country, the region, and even the continent, much more of their content has to focus on the specific realities of business and management in the developing country context,” the report states.
The assessment found some programmes failed to provide content and learning at a master’s level.
Others, ”apparently more concerned with enrolment numbers than with the soundness of the learning programme they offer introduced intermediate qualifications that have no real currency in the market”.
”Despite claims by providers about the contribution programmes such as these make to broadening access to postgraduate education, there can be little doubt that access to poor quality renders the democratisation of higher education empty,” the report states. – Sapa