Demographic challenges affecting business schools

Purpose - The paper seeks to provide a comprehensive review of the most important current and future demographic trends around the world and to discuss their implications for business schools. It aims to do so by going beyond the usual consideration of population size and also by focusing on the changing composition by age, sex and highest educational attainment.
Design/methodology/approach - Standard cohort-component population projections are complemented with methods of multi-state projections and probabilistic population projections.
Findings - The paper shows the likely end of world population growth together with massive anticipated population ageing in low fertility countries and continuing very high population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Western Asia. Because of past investments in education younger cohorts tend to be better educated. For business schools this presents challenges in terms of the composition of the student body and faculty as well as the content of teaching.
Originality/value - This is the first time that such multi-state projections of population and human capital around the world are discussed in the context of challenges arising for higher education.
KEYWORDS: Age groups; Demography; Human capital; Population; Students; Teaching

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