Welcome from the Dean
Welcome to the Faculty of Business and Enterprise. Our vision is to be Australia’s leading provider of high quality business degrees offering learning pathways into the professions, with an international reputation for teaching and research in entrepreneurship.We take pride in our commitment to entrepreneurship and innovation, a theme we explore in depth through the efforts of the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, the Faculty's graduate school. Here we offer graduate programs tailored to meet the needs of fast growing firms and those who want to be an entrepreneur in their own right. We also have an active team of researchers with a world class reputation in their field.
The Faculty also takes pride in the pathways we offer to students seeking to further their studies. We enjoy an excellent relationship with Swinburne's Technical and Further Education School of Business and eCommerce, which offers a variety of certificates, diplomas and advanced diplomas that articulate into our bachelor degrees. 40% of our undergraduate intake is accounted for by students articulating from TAFE with a credit or higher average grade. Importantly, these students do every bit as well as the Year 12 students entering into our programs with year 12 results that average 75 or more.
The Faculty is now well and truly into a major program of renewal and reinvigoration following a restructure in late 2004. The Faculty is going through a major growth phase, and we are recruiting a significant number of additional staff following a doubling of our undergraduate first year intake in 2005.
As part of this renewal effort, we are pursuing international accreditation with the European Management Foundation (EFMD) and the Association for the Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). This is proving to be an excellent exercise as we subject all of our activities to a rigorous program of review and renewal in order to be sure that we are as an organization genuinely mission-focussed and able to substantiate the claims we make with evidence.
Top of our mind is a commitment to the delivery of high quality teaching and learning. We take great pride in our consistently high cut-off score for entry to our undergraduate program. And we watch with considerable interest external assessments of our teaching quality, for these reflect very well on us indeed. The most recent data show that in business Swinburne performs well above the state and national averages on almost all key measures, from overall assessments of teaching quality through to more specific issues such as generic skills.
The Australian government recently undertook its first discipline-based assessment of teaching and learning quality, and it was no surprise to us to learn that we ranked very well indeed. As Table 1 shows, business at Swinburne was ranked in the top 6 for all 39 Australian universities. We were only one of two Victorian universities to come in the top class (Melbourne University was the other).
That we figure so well in these external assessments is not surprising. The Faculty of Business and Enterprise is one of the smallest business faculties in Australia. Our largest lecture theatre can seat only 180 students, compared to thousands in Australia's largest universities. This means students get to know their teaching staff, and teaching staff get to teach in a warm and intimate atmosphere other universities are unable to provide.
But more than anything else, the Faculty is about innovation, the spirit of enterprise and the practice of entrepreneurship. I welcome you to our Faculty and am sure that you too will find it an exciting and friendly place to be.
Australian Government Learning and Teaching Performance Fund 2007 Rankings for Business, Law and Economics (in alphabetical order)
Band A1
Swinburne University of Technology
The Australian National University
The University of Melbourne
The University of New South Wales
University of Technology, Sydney
University of Wollongong
Band A2
The University of Queensland
The University of Sydney
The University of Western Australia
University of Canberra
Band B
Australian Catholic University
Curtin University of Technology
Deakin University
Griffith University
Macquarie University
Monash University
Murdoch University
Southern Cross University
University of Tasmania
University of the Sunshine Coast
Band C
Australian Maritime College
Central Queensland University
Charles Darwin University
Charles Sturt University
Edith Cowan University
James Cook University
La Trobe University
Queensland University of Technology
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
The Flinders University of South Australia
The University of Adelaide
The University of New England
The University of Newcastle
University of Ballarat
University of South Australia
University of Southern Queensland
University of Western Sydney
Victoria University
