The Evolving Graduate Information Systems Education: A Survey of the U.S. Institutions

This paper reports the results of a survey of IS graduate programs across the United States. Information summarized includes statistics relating to the nature of institutions offering graduate IS programs, the characteristics of IS faculty members, and the content of these programs. Analyses of the responses suggest that the IS graduate programs are by no means universal: only 38% of the responding institutions had graduate IS programs. However, IS as an academic discipline has matured significantly, with 92% of the faculty holding terminal degrees and 70% having tenure. The most remarkable finding of this survey is that the graduate IS programs have been undergoing dramatic changes over the last five years in terms of contents, with the Internet and client/server related topics supplanting traditional systems analysis/design and programming courses. It is also found that graduate IS programs are putting more emphases on case studies of emerging technologies and corporate IS management strategies. The inf...