URI business school still growing at 90

COURSE WORK: URI College of Business Administration doctoral student Gerry Matos teaches a class at the school’s Providence campus. The program is celebrating its 90th anniversary. / PBN PHOTO/ MICHAEL SALERNO
COURSE WORK: URI College of Business Administration doctoral student Gerry Matos teaches a class at the school’s Providence campus. The program is celebrating its 90th anniversary. / PBN PHOTO/ MICHAEL SALERNO

The only business school in the state offering a doctorate, the University of Rhode Island’s College of Business Administration shows no signs of slowing a longstanding commitment to growth.
Soon to add an MBA concentration in health care and a master’s degree in finance as it celebrates 90 years of programming, the college continues to expand despite a lack of comparable growth in state funding, says college Dean Mark Higgins.
The presence of a doctoral program enhances the college’s and university’s reputation, enabling professional advancement of faculty as they collaborate with students and pursue research in their specialized fields, said Shaw Chen, an associate dean who oversees the doctoral program.
“If we weren’t a Ph.D. institution, most of the transmission of knowledge probably would be just one way, from faculty to student,” said Chen. “We go to the classroom to teach, but we also work with the Ph.D. student on research so we can push the boundary of knowledge into a different dimension.”
According to Higgins, “There’s a need for institutions to produce doctoral-qualified faculty for the next generation. I think a public institution owes the public that.”
The doctoral program, which began in 1991, has graduated 80 since 1995 – and 28 of those graduates have served in leadership positions at colleges and universities in the Northeast, Chen said – including Matthew Roy, of Portsmouth, an assistant provost at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Roy got his doctorate in management in 1995 and credits the URI faculty, particularly associate professor Sanjiv Dugal, with helping him publish a body of work that led to a successful academic career.
“I felt when I left that program I could compete with anybody nationally,” Roy told Providence Business News. “I left with four conference presentations and two refereed journal articles published – and that was solely because of the commitment of the faculty at URI. That impacted my whole trajectory as professor and allowed me to move into administration [at UMass Dartmouth].” Gerry Matos, 49, of East Greenwich, a doctoral student studying marketing and the concept of “cool,” chose URI’s program because of the school’s proximity to Boston, where he eventually may teach, and the availability of faculty doing “qualitative” research, he said. He has 20 years experience in the field of marketing, and has found URI’s 23-year-old Ph.D. program to be “well-respected,” he said, and its professors well-regarded.
“I got accepted at a couple of other programs, but URI was the best fit and that’s what you look for,” he said.
While the college is not ranked by U.S. News and World Report, Higgins indicated that most of the schools that make the rankings are “very well-funded.”
The 2013-14 budget, including fringe benefits, for the College of Business Administration was $9.4 million – smaller than many of its peers, he said. The University of Connecticut’s School of Business, in contrast, has an annual budget of $41.4 million, according to a spokeswoman there.
“Those are the resources you really need to move the needle,” Higgins said.
What’s more, he said, state funding for URI has been essentially flat for decades. It was approximately $64 million in 1988 – a substantial amount then, but today is only slightly higher, about $68 million for 2013-14, he said.
“It’s not that we’re not being good stewards,” he said. “If those are the rules of the game, you can’t be all things to all people. If I’m going to be given ‘X’ amount of money, I have to figure out how to maximize what we do.”
Maximizing resources has included streamlining core undergraduate coursework for every major in the college, Higgins said, and introducing new graduate-level offerings in health care and finance in “soft launches” to allow them to gain a foothold. The MBA with a concentration in health care starts this fall, but the university will make a marketing push for it in the spring, while the master of science degree in finance will be offered in the fall of 2015, Higgins said. College leaders sense a demand for both types of degrees, and the health care concentration could grow into a full-fledged MBA if there’s enough interest, he added.
This past year, in the college’s one-year strategic innovation MBA program, 19 of 22 students got internships, Higgins added.
Of URI’s 10,000-plus students, 1,500 studied at the College of Business Administration in 2013-14, said Higgins. The college started out with about a dozen students in 1923 and awarded its first degree in 1925-26, according to data provided by the school.
Enrollment has trended upward since Higgins, who started at URI as an assistant professor in accounting in 1988, became dean in 2006. At that time, there were 280 undergraduate students in the college’s freshman class. Two years ago, the number was 370, last year there were 430 students. A 490-member freshmen class for 2014-15 is the largest ever, he said.
The faculty includes 38 full-time professors, 13 lecturers and four half-time professors.
More than 17,095 bachelor’s degrees have been awarded to 11,782 men and 5,313 women since the school’s founding, with 6,251 continuing to live in Rhode Island. Also in Rhode Island are 1,514 graduates with MBAs, 409 with master of science degrees and 17 with doctorates, a school spokesperson said.
The College of Business Administration started out with undergraduate business courses, later added a master’s accounting degree in 1953, a part-time MBA in 1960, a full-time MBA in 1967, and a Ph.D. program in 1991. The accounting degrees are the only such programs in the state to hold separate accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International, Higgins said. Today, the college offers four types of degrees – a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, a Master of Science in Accounting, a Master of Business Administration or a Ph.D. in Business Administration.
Programs include accounting; entrepreneurial management; finance; general business; global business; marketing; supply-chain management; “green” business, which includes environmental economics; the “blue” MBA in Oceanography; a pharmacy MBA and a one-year MBA in strategic innovation.
Alumna Wendy Field of Westerly earned a bachelor of science degree in business administration in 1974. She is retired from UBS Investment Bank, a global financial-services company where she was a managing director, and says she values the educational offerings her alma mater provides. She has established and endowed URI’s “Never Too Early Future Leaders Fund” for experiential learning.
“A general business degree gives you a background, where you can walk in [to a job] and add value,” Field said.
The college also partners, like other schools, with businesses to increase experiential-learning offerings, which are more and more in demand, Higgins said.
“We go out and get projects from companies: GTECH, [Hasbro Inc.], [CVS Caremark Corp.], [Fidelity Investments],” he said, and nonprofits such as the Steel Yard.
GTECH of Providence values its partnership with the college, as it does its partnerships with other schools, said Angela Geryak Wiczek, vice president of corporate communications. Through the one-year MBA program in strategic innovation, for instance, students are paired with GTECH professionals to work on solving complex business problems.
“Students receive real-world, hands-on experience before they graduate,” Wiczek said in an email. •

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