"The future belongs to those universities that never stop" - Interview with Dr. Sara Csillag, Dean of the Faculty of Finance and Accountancy (BBS FFA), Budapest Business School. In addition to the FFA's market-leading position, her recent interview also discusses their future-oriented viewpoint, development plans and the social impact of higher education.
For two consecutive years, the FFA at BBS has become the most popular university Faculty in Hungary. What does this mean for you?
On the one hand, pride. Our former colleagues, who made such good decisions and overall did a great job over the past decades, have a role to play in our success, but I also hope that our attitude of being able to innovate and focus on the needs of our students also play contributes to our success. On the other hand, of course, it is a serious responsibility, since what and how we teach here and now has a huge impact due to the size of our student body. Therefore, we must continuously think about the future, and pass on knowledge that will still be relevant and valuable in 5-10 years.
What are the challenges for higher education institutions in economics and business today?
It is important to see that we are surrounded by a constantly changing market environment, and that we are living in a very turbulent period in social, demographic and economic terms. At BBS, we have long been involved in research into the future of higher education, including business higher education. It seems that business schools around the world have to meet more and more conflicting expectations while their funding is constantly changing. The future definitely belongs to those universities that never stop, but continuously innovate, experiment and develop in co-operation with their business and societal partners. I think that the FFA is characterised by both co-operation and continuous innovation, both in terms of content and methodology.
BBS has been the number one choice for those interested in undergraduate business for years, but what about Master’s degrees? Will students remain attached to BBS? What competition is there between universities in this area?
The Faculty's three undergraduate courses in management sciences (Human Resources, Business Administration and Management, Finance and Accounting) and Business Information Technology are dominant in the Hungarian market. The feedback from the market on our part-time Master’s programme is positive and our position is stable in this respect, as shown by the excess of applications. About half of our students in the Master’s programme come from one of BBS’ undergraduate programs, the rest from other universities. We have been thinking and working intensively for years about our Master's programmes. We have updated our Master's in Finance and the Master’s in Accountancy in recent years, our Master's degree in Business Management started six years ago, and our Master's degree in Management and Leadership began two years ago. The question of how to retain students to study further for a Master’s degree is is not only relevant at BBS, but in the whole of Hungarian higher education.
What can be done about this? What developments are expected in this area?
At BBS, we recently mapped out a student’s life path with all its stages from enrollment to the alumni stage, togther with the related university services. We have identified and marked the critical points that we consider the most important based on urgency or impact, and identified the tasks associated with them. One such key point is digitisation: it is important to try to solve as many administrative processes as easily as possible and thus improve the overall student experience. It is clear that digitisation will be a priority in the development of student services in the coming years. The other important issue is student life path management, which is a very exciting and complex area. This includes nurturing talent, but also anticipating student needs using a variety of algorithms developed for this purpose, so that we can respond to them in a timely manner, or even by preventing problems. The emerging framework will include the characteristics of the students, their incoming scores, and will allow us to track their performance (e.g.: credits earned, language exams acquired or lack thereof). Thus, we can even offer personalized support in solving the current or future difficulties arising from these, or we can intervene in the form of a catch-up course, student mentoring, mental hygiene, or career counseling as just a few examples. Of course, similar frameworks are already in place in Western Europe. In our case, the exciting thing is that we are an institution with a huge student body, and it is very different to create and develop such a system in small programme of 50 or a cohort of 2,000. I believe it is very important to pay attention to and respond to student needs in our educational practice and in our university processes.
Responding to student needs, specifically student mentoring, has been available at the Faculty for several years. What are the experiences?
Thinking about the student's life and career path is really not new to us: we started our mentoring program in the Bachelor's degree programmes three years ago, where our 1,500 full-time first-year students have a senior student mentor assigned to help them with basic administration and study problems, but beyond that, in all other matters as well. We train our mentors of course, and we have developed an online curriculum for this. By now, this has become a completely independent project for students, which, in addition to helping to reduce attrition, has a huge community-building impact. In addition to the mentoring programme, the FFA+ programme is a new feature, where students with high scores are welcome. The point here is that during the years spent in the undergraduate programme, students can study certain subjects in smaller groups with a different methodology and at a higher level, in a kind of talent-nurturing mode. The programme is for those who want to devote more energy to their studies and gain deeper knowledge. We hope that the additional knowledge acquired in the FFA+ programme will encourage our students to continue their studies at the Master's level and perhaps after completing that, even in a doctoral programme.
We often hear about BBS being a practice-focused university. What exactly does this mean, and does it not contradict the future-oriented thinking mentioned earlier?
We think of ourselves as a practice- and future-oriented university. At the moment, I think there is a huge contradiction in the system of expectations associated with university degrees. On the one hand, it is important that the graduates have up-to-date and quickly applicable knowledge, while we also want them to be able to think critically, solve problems and to develop. I think we need to strike a balance between being able to meet the short and long-term expectations of those involved. There are universities where they completely distance themselves from reflecting on day-to-day corporate needs because they believe that universities are not servants of the job market, but rather that they have other global responsibilities. We do keep in mind current events and strive to pass them along, but we also consider it an important task to train thinking people who are responsible for their narrower and their wider environments. At BBS, our primary client is the student, but we also consider the labor market players and society to be important stakeholders. We are trying to bring elements into the programmes like specific case studies, software, corporate guest lecturers, that show for example, what is the important, up-to-date knowledge at a given moment say in February 2022. For this we rely heavily on our alumni community, whose members are prominent players in the current business life. So we know what excites companies today, but we’re also looking to go beyond that.
This is what a practical-focused, future-oriented way of thinking means to us.