China Lacks Qualified MBA Professors

The China Economic Review reports:

In China, filling this pipeline takes even longer due to the lack of experienced mentor professors. What experienced faculty mentors are available were largely trained up in the old command economy system, which makes their perspective less pertinent. In the case of mentors for emerging business professors, almost all of them must be imported (or convinced to return) from comfortable and lucrative positions overseas, a tough - although not impossible - sell.

At the same time, domestic academic standards are low across the board. In a survey conducted by the Ministry of Science and Technology, 60% of mainland PhDs admitted to plagiarizing work and paying bribes for journal placement. Enforcement of academic intellectual property rights remains contradictory; while doctoral students are frequently required to publish, they are rarely punished for plagiarizing or fabricating research, or for claiming publication of articles that do not exist.

Unfortunately, Chinese business schools cannot import their way out of this problem, even in the short term. While in many of the subject areas (the humanities in particular) doctoral graduates outnumber teaching positions by orders of magnitude, everyone acknowledges there is a global shortage of talented business faculty.

"The lack of flow of PhDs has been an issue for the sector globally for a long time," said HKUST's Cheng.