Proposals to introduce an undergraduate minor in technology management and to expand the full-time and part-time MBA programs are leading the academic planning of the Graduate School of Management through 2005-06.In its current academic plan, the school proposes to increase the size of its full-time MBA program from 120 to 170 and to explore two options that would grow its Working Professionals program from a total of 250 students to 280 or more. And the technology management minor would be designed to accommodate, each year, 200 new students majoring in engineering, the biological sciences or the physical sciences. The plans could increase the school's 23.5 faculty positions to about 36.

Together, the proposals would help overcome what Dean Robert Smiley identifies as the school's number one constraint - its small size. He says the increase in students and faculty positions would allow the school to offer additional courses, broaden its curriculum, provide more research partners for faculty members and attract more companies to campus to recruit graduates.

"We really do have a critical mass issue that needs to be addressed," says Smiley. The school is the smallest - as measured by students or faculty members - to be ranked among the nation's top 50 MBA schools by both Business Week and U.S. News & World Report magazines.

Undergraduate minor

The minor in technology management is designed to allow students majoring in engineering, the biological and physical sciences, or related fields to study how engineering and science-based industries manage and use knowledge from science, engineering and technology.

"With technology industries becoming the state's leading employers," Smiley wrote in the plan, "this minor is well positioned to improve the attractiveness of UC Davis as an undergraduate destination in engineering and the sciences."

The minor has strong support within the College of Engineering and the Division of Biological Sciences. With preliminary support from the Academic Planning Council, the courses are now before the college's and the division's curriculum committees. Pend-

ing necessary approvals, the minor could be available to students as early as fall 2001.

Students would be required to take four-unit courses in technology management, managing costs and quality, managing and using information technology, and marketing for the technology-based enterprise; they would choose as their elective a four-unit course on financing new business ventures or one on supply-chain planning and management.

It is estimated that the minor would require an additional 4.75 faculty positions along with some additional staff resources for advising, admissions and technology infrastructure.

Since 1992-93, the school has taught lower-division accounting courses with an enrollment of 1,330 in 1999-00.

Full-time MBA program

The proposal to expand the full-time MBA program to 170 students, Smiley says, is responding to strong demand for the program and would return the program to its size of the early 1990s. In 1993, the program was scaled back to allow for the launch of the part-time Working Professionals MBA program without additional resources.

"More than ever these days, the aspiring manager in industry gets an MBA," says Smiley.

"The establishment of the MBA as a credential for management in the future is quite clear."

From 1990 through 1999, the full-time program experienced a 66 percent increase in applications, from 285 to 472. There were 410 applications for this fall's entering class, and total enrollment for first- and second-year students stands at 122.

In 2000, the number of MBA applications dropped by 13 percent from its all time high in 1999, similar to the decline felt at UC campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles and Irvine. Smiley attributes the decrease to the dot.com job market. "We think what is happening is the e-commerce market is so hot that people are unwilling to interrupt their employment and stock options this year and so are postponing entry into the MBA market."

The expansion proposal has the support of the Academic Planning Council and will have funding for four faculty positions. At the earliest, it would be implemented in the fall of 2002.

Working professionals MBA program

The UC Office of the President has provided the school with $25,000 for research to determine if there is sufficient market to expand its Working Professionals MBA program in two ways.

The first, serving the Central Valley, would combine distance learning with students' monthly visits to Sacramento for weekend classes. The other, designed to meet interest from the Bay Area, would offer the program on weekends only in Sacramento.

As the program exists now, working professionals take courses on weeknights in downtown Sacramento and on Saturdays at the Davis campus. They typically graduate in three years.

Smiley says the program provides the school with more than $2 million in revenues and 40 percent of its annual budget.

The two expansion options would need to enroll about 30 additional students to break even, he says. The proposed offerings would probably require an additional five faculty positions and one staff position.

Because the faculty positions would be funded by the program revenues, they would need to be approved by both the campus and the Office of the President. Smiley says implementation of the options, probably one at a time, would begin no sooner than 2002.