Fifth Year Maintenance Report - University of Minnesota

• A separate Marketing Department was formed to reduce inefficiencies and administrative
workload due to the size of the original Management Studies Department (which had
included the marketing faculty).
• Assurance of Learning processes, including embedded assessment and the Major Field
Test (MFT), have yielded improvements to curriculum design and delivery.
• Faculty productivity and performance were monitored constantly, via the Digital
Measures software reporting system. Program definitions of academically and
professionally qualified faculty were developed and monitored. Definitions of
participating and supporting faculty were developed and monitored. Changes in faculty
development and composition were made, and most targets were met.
• A visit was made to one of our aspirant schools to learn how they incorporate
sustainability into their curriculum.
• Responding to demand, a new major in Health Care Management was started in 2006.
• An LSBE laptop requirement initiative was implemented. (To prepare our students for
the 21 st century workplace, all LSBE students enrolled in Fall 2009 will be required to
have a laptop or tablet computer.)
• In 2003, the school was renamed the Labovitz School of Business and Economics after
$4.5 million was donated by Joel and Sharon Labovitz. In May of 2008, LSBE moved
into a new state-of-the-art Gold Level LEED-certified building (the first LEED academic
building in the state of Minnesota). The building provides needed new facilities for our
expanding programs, excellent teaching space, and is environmentally friendly.
Areas for continuous improvement include:
• Managing growth of BBA and BAcc majors within constraints of budget and economic
pressures.
• Recruiting finance faculty and meeting academically-qualified goals in the area of
finance.
• Fine-tuning the Assurance of Learning processes to further discover issues which need to
be resolved. This may involve reducing the number of objectives for our programs.
• Recruiting a more diverse student body. Even though LSBE has a representation of
ethnicities similar to UMD, more diversity is needed; 91% of LSBE students are white.
• Need to effectively incorporate sustainability into our programs.
EFFECTIVE PRACTICES
The Labovitz School of Business and Economics has demonstrated effective practices in the
following areas:
• High quality faculty, staff and administrators. Over 85% of our faculty have a PhD or
other terminal degree (including ABDs) in their chosen field.
• Strong faculty who win many teaching awards. For example, within a cohort of
approximately 38 eligible faculty, over the last 30 years we have had eight Morse Award
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