Future Directions for Business Education: A Delphi Study

Overview & Synopsis

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to synthesize perceptions from the field about current issues and to propose future directions for the field of business education. Method: A modified three-stage Delphi study was carried out with business educators who attended national conferences and/or belonged to national professional organizations. After a first stage of Likert-style surveys about trends, assumptions, and practices in the field, business educators, in the second stage of the study, provided open-ended responses to questions about issues, and, in the third stage, responded to an online twenty-statement Likert-style survey which also included open-ended responses. Results: Key concerns for leaders in the field relate to: balancing the general education versus career preparation purposes; determining how to balance public, private, and special legislative financing of business education programs; responding to legislative mandates, while an elective course area, for incorporating academic content into applied business courses; and differentiating business education as a field responsible for a wide range of content. Conclusions/Implications: Given the breadth of content, quality teacher preparation is a challenge as options for becoming licensed have both shrunk as higher-education programs in business education have disappeared and have expanded with alternative and online licensing options. Parts of the field, information technology, in particular, are not unique to business and require preparation at a variety of levels. Teaching technology effectively also requires balancing the technical content with the content implied in the problems chosen requiring technical solutions. Other parts of education use technology and participate in instruction in this area. Similar content overlaps can be in other business content areas, such as consumer education within economics. The challenge to business educators is to make sure that business content remains prominent and compelling. (Contains 7 tables.)