Business School Graduate Profiles: From the Declared Ideal to Discordance Between Business School Executives An Analysis of Five Jesuit Business Schools

Business schools strive to mold their graduates to reflect the values and profile espoused in their mission statements. The aim of our study is to examine the extent to which institutions achieve coherence or divergence between their declared missions and their application within the institutional context.

We focus on five business schools associated with the Society of Jesus (SJ) in Spain, a decidedly mission-driven group of institutions. Their values and references to Christian faith are at the very heart of their educational purpose. We want to understand how presidents and rectors at these institutions conceptualize and articulate the ideal traits of their graduates in comparison to how well those ideal traits are promoted in practice according to deans and academic directors.

We use concept maps and a survey to gather empirical data. Concept mapping allows us to transform the group of experts’ ideas into data that we can weigh, group and represent via a concept map. A survey then allows us to gain insights on the opinions of a larger number of people regarding the results of the previous exercise.

Our results allow us to analyze, compare and contrast the opinions of the two executive

levels, enabling us to also contrast these with the Ledesma .Kolvenbach Paradigm, an educational model based on the Society of  Jesus' Christian -inspired values.