Now that the Fuqua School of Business has established a foothold in executive MBA education, it is looking to improve its doctoral program by doubling the number of students in the next few years.
Doug Breeden, dean of the business school, said strengthening the program is one of his top priorities, as he devotes more attention to it as the academic year progresses.
"I'm really excited about that," Breeden said. "We're moving rapidly to increase the [number of students in the] program, particularly in marketing and finance."
There are a total of 57 students in the Ph.D. program, which is taught by Fuqua professors and run through the Graduate School.
Other top schools' programs are substantially larger. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania supports a total of 180 Ph.D. students. The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University admits about 25 students each year.
The barrier to increasing the program has been the number of faculty members, as Fuqua is much smaller than Kellogg, Wharton and other competitive business schools. But the business school increased its faculty by a net of 17 last year to 78 and hopes to grow to 100 professors in the next three to four years.
James Bettman, director of the program in business administration, agreed that increasing the number of students was important and complimented the current strength of the program.
"I think we're getting outstanding students [based] on all sorts of standard criteria," he said. "Generally, we [have] an excellent placement rate--people are going to really good places."
He added that doctoral students take courses from faculty in economics, psychology and even at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to supplement their Fuqua coursework, and will likely continue to do so.
Breeden said increasing enrollment will contribute to more intense research throughout the school.
John Payne, deputy dean of Fuqua, agreed. "I think that good Ph.D. students encourage and support faculty to maintain an intellectual excitement that enhances the research that comes out of Fuqua [in] questions they ask... and unexplored regions that need to be looked at," Payne said.
Bettman said that in addition to faculty, other resources will be necessary, such as more office space and administrative support. Payne said the expanded program would require more computers and that a large part of the Fox Student Center--scheduled for completion in March 2003--will be reserved for doctoral students.
Currently, there are Ph.D. programs in six areas. Most students, however, are in three of those--finance, management and marketing.
Payne hoped that in addition to strengthening those three concentrations, the school could attract more students to accounting, operations management and decision science as well as programs in new areas.
"In some areas like accounting, where we haven't had as much Ph.D. research as in the past, we'd like to do more of that," he said. "Where we haven't had a major presence [with Ph.D. education], we're expanding numbers but also expanding breadth."
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