Bond University’s business school has a substantial numbers advantage. The school employs more lecturers and adjunct lecturers per student than any other university business school in Australia. The ratio works out to about 11 or 12 students for each faculty member, says the school’s executive dean, Professor Robin Gauld. Roughly 50 full-time-equivalent faculty teach about 600 full-time-equivalent students at the business school in the private not-for-profit university on the Gold Coast. “There’s nothing else like it,” Gauld adds. “In Australia, my understanding is the average across business schools is 35 to one.”
Far smaller than many city universities and set in a regional location, Bond provides a more personal and individualised experience for students who might get lost in the anonymity of big-city institutions.
The business school does not offer online tuition and students attend face-to-face lectures and workshops on campus.
“All of our classes are small classes,” Gauld says. “They’re very interactive. There is no way, by day two, that a student isn’t participating in some kind of in-class discussion. If you come to Bond, to study any of our undergraduate degrees and the vast majority of the post-grad degrees as well, then you come to be on campus, you come to be in a class with other people and to interact.”
The winner of the teaching category in the Australian Financial Review’s BOSS Best Business Schools list, the small and agile business school has leaned into technology and now it is well set for the artificial intelligence revolution, he adds.
“We are still facing the challenges that others face, of course, but because of our small class interactive model, we believe we’re in a very, very strong position for the increasing onset of generative AI,” says Gauld, who joined Bond from Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand, at the beginning of this year.
“There’s a lot of talk about the need for case-based learning and small-class teaching, which is exactly what we do,” he adds. “So we believe we’re in quite an advanced position in terms of what’s needed, and we will continue to steer our classes in that way.”
As well as coaching students in genAI across all classes and offering executive courses in AI, the business school plans to soon introduce a new undergraduate course – AI for Business. The course will include AI, software engineering, data analytics, entrepreneurship and business skills.
With a long-standing focus on business case writing, the business school uses a business case teaching model in classes, Gauld says. The business school academics produce about ten business cases a year, he adds, while business cases from Harvard are also used for teaching and the school has a co-branding business case agreement with the Ivey Business School in Canada.
All the Bond business school undergraduate degrees are accelerated and they only last two years, taught over three semesters each year. By contrast with other institutions, the Bond end-of-year break is short and the semesters are long. “Our students are here for much of the year,” Gauld says, adding the intensive learning is attractive for students who “want to be out the door and in the workplace earning a salary within two years”.
About one-third of the business school’s students are from Queensland, one third from elsewhere in Australia and ideally one-third from abroad, Gauld says, although the numbers of international students have dwindled a little since the government capped the intake. These proportions provide for rich mix of different views and understanding in the student cohort, he adds, and university-wide compulsory courses mean business school students also get to study with students from other disciplines.
Every first-year Bond student has to complete three compulsory courses: group and teamwork, ethics and responsibility and critical analysis. Students from the architecture, law, psychology, international relations, medicine and business disciplines study these courses together, he adds.
Students from across the university also come together at the business school’s enterprise incubator, the Transformer, where they work in teams to develop practical solutions for real-world problems. A medical student with a big idea might team up with a business school student to bring an idea to fruition and eventually to market.
“We have a very, very strong entrepreneurial focus at Bond and in the business school,” Gault adds. “We run start-up competitions each semester, we have a series of business-people who come in each week to work as mentors with students who are working on their business start-up ideas, and we have investment funding to help bring ideas to market.”
Bond business school graduates with these sorts of skills are in high demand, he says, adding that employers are keen to hire them and willing to pay them higher-than-average wages: such as starting package of $90,000 per annum for a newly-minted graduate.
On the other side of the nation, the University of Western Australia’s business school is in the capital of Australia’s wealthiest state, a city that’s geographically closer to Jakarta than it is to Sydney, and in the same time zone as Singapore and Beijing.
About 5,000 students study on campus at the business school, which placed third in the teaching category in the Australian Financial Review’s BOSS Best Business Schools list.
The UWA business school is housed in a bespoke building by the side of the Swan River. Opened in 2008, the building was originally an initiative of the school’s heavy-weight advisory board, which orchestrated a fundraising campaign for its construction.
With the chief executives of some of Australia’s richest companies (currently including Wesfarmers, CBH, and Alcoa) serving as board-members, the school’s board has continued to closely engage with plans and developments.
“That’s one of the strengths of the school,” says Peter Robertson, who has been the dean of the business school since 2017. “There are very, very strong connections with industry.”
The board strongly supported and helped design the school’s Financial Markets Trading Room, with live data terminals like those used by professionals. Now a formal unit, the Student Managed Enterprise Investment Fund has two classes a year, one for under-graduate students and one for post-grads.
Each class is given $50,000 and the students team up in groups of about five to decide on portfolios. Their portfolios are judged by panels of external experts, and Robertson says the students usually turn a profit.
“It was a student club initially, run with the help of a board member, and just in the last 12 to 18 months we’ve rolled it into a unit,” Robertson says. “Students are basically doing it in a more structured way, with a course coordinator.”
The business school also regularly welcomes C-suite executives from around the country, and from London, to come and address students. “They come in and talk to the students about some of the more interesting decisions they’ve had to make and how they navigated their business environments,” Robertson says.
“Again, through the strength of our board, we’re able to have one-on-one mentoring for all of our MBA cohort in the full-time MBA class. That’s pretty special. It really enhances their employability.”
UWA business school students can use genAI, but they are expected to declare how much it has been used in their work. Robertson believes the revolutionary tool will provide a range of opportunities to boost productivity.
“But it’s very important students have been taught to think through problems and understand how they can find solutions to problems that don’t exist yet,” he says.
One of the school’s fairly new courses is the Master of Business Analytics, which grew dramatically during and after the Covid pandemic. “It incorporates units like how to present data, how to tell stories with data, how to communicate with business,” Robertson says, adding that the course helps data specialists understand how to present to a board, or how to make a case to management.
The university has developed partnerships with business for this course, so students form into small groups to find solutions to various problems. One of the partnerships is with the Perth Wildcats basketball team, so the students use data analytics to determine who would be the best basketballer picks for the money available in order to maximise the chance of winning.
It’s a little like the method employed in Hollywood movie ‘Moneyball’, Robertson says. “The students get a great kick out of it, and the Wildcats keep coming back for more,” he adds. “It’s really good partnership.”