Do MBA Degrees Matter? A Study of Boards of Directors in Australia's Top 200 Companies
Pfeffer and Fong (2002) suggest that “business school enrolments have soared and business education has become a big business”. The Master of Business (MBA) degree has often been held out to be useful in the career development of managers. The highest level that managers can aspire to, is to be a director of a large public company. This study investigates how many directors within the boards of Australia’s top 200 companies by market capitalization hold an MBA degree. We find that larger companies have proportionally more MBA holding directors than smaller companies. Interestingly we also find that proportionally more women hold MBAs than men, nearly one in five women directors hold an MBA within the top 200 companies dataset.
Keywords: Business Schools, MBA, Board of Directors, Women Directors, Management
Dr. Elizabeth Sophie Mary Manning
Lecturer, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Deakin University
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Dr. Bill Dimovski
Senior Lecturer, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Deakin University
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Ref: L07P0873