G. Representation of Female and Minority Faculty in the Department

In regard to the diversity of the EB faculty, we have made good faith efforts in our searches for a 4^th-faculty member in 2003-04, 2004-05 and 2009-10. In the latter search our finalists were a Korean-American male and a Caucasian female. Our continuing plan is to renew contacts with top female and minority grads, encouraging them to pursue graduate work in Business and Economics, and maintaining contact with them. One 2009 grad who is Asian-American has just entered a PhD program in Economics in the Southern California area. We also continue to maintain contacts through professional organizations in economics and entrepreneurship with female/minority candidates and with colleagues at similar colleges to Westmont.

Our plan is to continue to compete with our Southern California peer group. Over the past three years, we have been encouraged by preliminary discussions with two different African-American female business PhDs who have expressed interest in teaching at Westmont. We also believe the Westmont administration should analyze the possibilities of offering differential pay and/or reduced course load to draw particularly attractive diverse faculty candidates.

H. Advising Load

Our departmental advising load is fairly even, as we each advise on average 45 students. This level of advisees can certainly diminish the quality of the time we spend with each advisee, particularly during pre-registration time (compared to other students). Having most of our free time slots filled with appointments impacts our ability to carry out the rest of our responsibilities. Plus, the amount of time we are able to spend with each student is necessarily limited. We see ourselves as careful advisors, and we rarely make serious mistakes in guiding students through their academic programs. On the other hand, given our numbers it’s a challenge to move beyond a rudimentary level of engagement with our advisees. Having less advisees per faculty member would be very helpful in this regard.

The data tells us that our program has graduates that are largely male and white. Graduates from undergraduate economics and business programs in the United States fall predominantly into the white, non-hispanic category. In comparison, Westmont’s Economics and Business graduates were 80% white, non-hispanic during the years covered by this review. The difference can be attributed to fewer numbers of black, non-hispanic students (1.4% compared to 7.7% in the national population) and Asian or Pacific islanders (7% compared to 14.5%). As with the case of gender diversity, factors that affect the ethnic balance among Economics and Business students appear to be those that determine enrollment and retention at Westmont in general.

In reviewing the data on our graduates we discovered that the ethnic diversity of Economics and Business graduates is representative of the institution as a whole. Although one could argue that changes such as hiring a person of color for the next faculty opening in the department might help catalyze Westmont’s movement toward greater ethnic diversity, there is no indication that the Economics and Business program impacts retention of ethnic minorities or under-represented groups in a way that is distinct from the College as a whole. In the case of gender diversity, there is a larger proportion of males in our program relative to the gender balance in the College as a whole.
J. Trends in the Number and Quality of Declared EB Majors and Graduates Over the Past 6 years
We are encouraged by the ongoing interest in our program as evidenced by the high enrollments in our courses and the large numbers of students graduating with a Economics and Business major. However, our size is not without its challenges. One impact of the high student-to-faculty ratio is the large number of students each of us advises (average around 45).

There are a number of ways in which we have tried to address this impact of large enrollments on the curriculum, including encouraging students to take courses off-campus in our summer programs such as IBI and Westmont in China Another way in which we have addressed this issue is through recruiting adjunct faculty to teach in our program. This has enabled us to offer courses that enrich the curriculum, to teach needed courses that exceed departmental faculty load limits, and, of course, to cover the teaching assignments of faculty members who are on sabbatical leave. Growing our faculty will contribute to solving some of the issues arising from the size of our major. However, even with an additional person in the department, we anticipate a continuing role for some adjunct instructors.

Large class enrollments also affect the curriculum of the Department as a whole. Approximately 35% of the alumni survey respondents mentioned a limited selection of courses when asked for ways in which the program could be improved, speaking to our need to increase the ability of students to specialize more in depth in certain areas of the EB curriculum. In this regard, its interesting that four career areas comprise 50% of the alumni surveyed: marketing/sales; investment banking/money management; real estate; and accounting/auditing. While we have been able to add a few more courses such as real estate accounting and auditing which match with these fields, the reality is that there is very little discretionary teaching load in the department.
K. Data Sources and Discussion

Data on faculty loads and characteristics of our graduating seniors were obtained from institutional sources. They are presented in the files in the Records Economics and Business Program Reports. We developed an alumni survey in order develop a picture of what our graduates are doing. The link to the survey was emailed to 2100 graduates of our program from the years 1960 to 2008. 408 responses were received from individuals (22.5%) where 5-10% is normal. A copy of questionnaire and an Excel spreadsheet with all of the responses can be accessed in the Economics and Business Department Program Review Portfolio. The survey population appears to be representative of our students as a group.

The Economics and Business Department developed three goals for our program which have been revised somewhat as we have applied them to our subsequent assessment activities. Specific objectives for each goal and the ways in which the goals are addressed in our program are detailed in Chart 4 which follows the general description of our department’s program.

The courses Business Research and Forecasting, Corporate Finance, Investments and Portfolio Management, and Applied Management Science, explicitly deal with the role of quantitative student research, including the “Conclusion”, “Inferences”, and “Ideas for Further Research” sections of student work. Students are then required to provide a more formal “Research Rationale” for all projects, writing assignments, and oral presentations that include outside research sources and methodologies. Likewise the History of Economic Thought, American Economic History, Globalization, and Money, Banking and Financial Markets courses require students to decide upon a research question, pursue research through sorting out the parameters of the question through both the primary and secondary literature, and develop a nuanced response to the question through careful analysis.

Both as a liberal arts college and a Christian intellectual community, Westmont is committed to helping students relate academic disciplines both to learning in other disciplines and to theological understanding in the Christian tradition. Our graduates are exposed to, and trained in, the major concepts of economics and business prevalent in the discipline today, but they are also encouraged to think broadly, making relevant connections between economics and business and other disciplines, such as political science, philosophy and religious studies. Economics as an area of study revolves around the ‘economic way of thinking’ as expressed in the application to everyday life and modern social controversies of key concepts such as opportunity cost, comparative advantage, market analysis, and monetary and fiscal policy (see Records Program Report files).

Increasingly economics is drawing on the insights of other disciplines as well, such as political science and psychology. Recognizing the changing nature of the discipline, it is important for our graduates, and for their potential role as educated participants in the civic square, that they be able to move beyond sloganeering and generate astute, respectful dialogue that engages the range, nuance, and complexity of approaches to economic and business issues. As our students work to develop an understanding of these complex issues, they are meeting the institutional learning standards of Christian Orientation, Critical-Interdisciplinary Thinking, and Active Societal and Intellectual Engagement.

Although there is no national organization that has established standards for Economics and Business curricula at the undergraduate level, a general consensus has emerged informally through the years. We compared our major requirements and courses to those of eleven liberal arts colleges, both Christian and secular, and the results are summarized in the Records Program Report files. There is general agreement that students need to have a foundation in Economics, with all institutions requiring at least a year of principles of Economics courses required by the comparison institutions ranged from two to eight courses with an average of 5.5 courses. Westmont’s Economics and Business program requires 3 economics courses, while the average requirements among the comparison institutions were 1.2 and 2.3 courses, respectively.

There was quite a bit of diversity among the comparison colleges in the number of units required for an Economics and Business major, ranging from 40 to 70 with an average of 58.7 units required. The Westmont major requires 47-49 units. We require two semesters of principles of economics at the lower division level and one upper division course. In examining other programs, we found that lower division requirements varied between 2 and 4 courses, and programs differed in the extent to which they prescribed the courses to be taken at the upper division level. Seven of the eleven programs required upper division courses. At liberal arts colleges, it is more common to see separate majors or tracks within the economics and business major. In our department, we have several different emphases but no requirement students choose a track.

Our program requires of all majors a solid core of economic theory foundations along with the ability to tailor a program that allows for some small degree of specialization. Students can take the equivalent of an economics major or they may emphasize entrepreneurship, finance, or accounting along with courses in marketing, business law, and management. In comparison to Occidental, Pomona, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Carleton, and St. Olaf, Westmont offers more options in business with all of these schools having economics departments only. These programs also compare fairly closely to Westmont in the number of credits required for their economics majors (some with other options of emphases within their majors) with an average of 54 credits required in economics programs and Westmont averaging 48. Including all of the schools offering economics majors, the total credits required is 50 units. The more specialized business programs average 59 units required. The EB department has always chosen to require more economics than would be true of various business majors and to not become specialized in various fields of business. As our catalog says, we offer a major that is: distinctively broad – integrating the essential components of economics and business, and deeply engaging – challenging students to address contemporary issues with critical thinking, personal conviction, and a Christian perspective. Many institutions offer separate degrees in economics or business. Our program intentionally blends these fields to demonstrate the timeless synergies between the core tenets of economic theory, and the functional disciplines of business venturing, such that all models, graphics, terminology, constructs, and simulations are explored from the integrative perspectives of both the economist and the business manager.

The study of peer institutions also suggests that Westmont EB faculty do have relatively heavy loads of advising and class size. Data on department graduates compared with full time faculty show that Westmont faculty have a student/faculty ratio of 52.9 compared with an average at the other schools of 30 (this includes an outlier at Houghton where a reported 29% of the graduates are in business with a faculty of 6 and a student/faculty ratio of 69). Not including Houghton the average student/faculty ratio is 26. We strongly believe that we need to increase our department to 5 full time members to resolve the heavy load of students per faculty member.