Exacting Standards in Higher Education

Comenius University Produces Business Managers Well-Trained in SAS®

Comenius University in Bratislava is the oldest university in the Slovak Republic, but its roots go back much further. It follows the university tradition of the Academia Istropolitana, which was established in Bratislava by Matthias Corvinus, the Hungarian king, in 1465. An internationally oriented center of excellence, it is a national university that values its intellectual relationship with the Slovak nation.

The faculty of management, the newest of Comenius University's eight faculties, was founded in 1991. It focuses primarily on economics, with the goal of developing a new generation of leaders for Slovak business. Lecturer Iveta Stankovicová uses SAS software for her own research and teaches students how to use SAS so they may develop the necessary skills to compete in the business world.

SAS Academic Initiative
Collaboration between SAS and Comenius University began in 1999 when the university acquired 50 SAS software licenses as part of the SAS Academic Initiative, a program that makes software available to students, researchers and professors in more than 3,400 academic institutions worldwide.

University lecturers such as Stankovicová are simultaneously using SAS for their own research programs while teaching its application as a business solution. The faculty of management, which has half of the university's SAS licenses, is very strong in quantitative methods: Most of its teaching staff has a background in mathematics or statistical economics – the dean, Prof. RNDr. Jozef Komornik, DrSc., is himself a statistician. Many staff members, including Stankovicová, have considerable practical experience in SAS.

The faculty of management teaches statistics in three compulsory undergraduate courses: Introduction to Statistics, Statistics on the PC and Statistical Methods. In these courses, students are introduced to mathematical statistical methods in the core modules of SAS software. Students can then choose more advanced courses in their third year: Quantitative Methods, covering logistic regression, principal components analysis, cluster analysis and discriminant analysis using SAS/STAT and SAS Enterprise Guide; and Time Series Analysis, a course which focuses on ARIMA models, using SAS Enterprise Guide. Altogether, approximately 200 students in the faculty of management study statistics with SAS.

Solving Real Business Problems
Comenius University does not simply teach SAS, but also integrates practical activities into the study. For example, within each course, students engage in their own projects. In the third year, students are invited to take part in a Student Professional Activity Competition. "We receive roughly 15 entries per year, and the standard of the work is very high," says Stankovicová. Advanced students at the university have used SAS to perform research for their diploma theses, delving into such topics as information systems, data analysis and scorecarding. Additionally, Comenius students and teachers participate in the annual SAS Forum hosted by the SAS office in Bratislava.

"There is no doubt that knowledge of SAS makes our students more marketable," says Stankovicová. "Companies in the Slovak Republic and beyond are looking for people who can apply these skills and this knowledge to solve real business problems."

The Competitive Advantage of Data Mining
Stankovicová is currently working on her own final doctoral thesis, entitled Statistical Methods in Data Mining, which will be submitted at the end of 2003. Her objective is to demonstrate the power of data mining in revealing previously unknown yet profitable information in vast quantities of operational data to commercial organizations in the Slovak Republic. She explains: "Data mining is a new concept in the Slovak Republic, and companies are hesitant about being the first to make a serious commitment to the methods and techniques that are available. My aim is to demonstrate the competitive advantages that financial institutions, in particular, can obtain from statistical methods in data mining." At present there is no literature on data mining available in the Slovak language – so Stankovicová's work represents an important breakthrough for the country's businesses. As part of the SAS Academic Initiative, SAS sponsors doctoral candidates and other research students with the software.

The analytic tools that Stankovicová is exploring include such statistical methods as linear and logistic regression, multidimensional methods, and time series analysis. She says that some of these methods in SAS "border on artificial intelligence techniques." The study also covers nonstatistical methods such as neural networks and genetic algorithms, and mixed methods such as classification and regression trees.

Extending SAS Teaching to Business Topics
Comenius University's faculty of management plans to teach SAS in additional courses covering such topics as marketing research, data mining, financial analysis, quality control and operational management. The emphasis is on a seamless combination of the theoretical and the practical. "Our students are tomorrow's business managers, not programmers or statisticians. What is important is that they should understand the benefits that they can expect from various analytical and statistical methods, and they be able to read and interpret the outputs. Our undergraduate courses give students this basic grounding. So when they face real business problems, either as research students or in the commercial world, they can make valid judgments about the application of SAS software. In today's world, it is increasingly important to be able to validate business decisions with the appropriate quantitative methods," says Stankovicová.

"We want our students to have a good feel for business, but we want them to be exact in their approach. This is what will make them highly marketable individuals, because only a minority of management school graduates offers a thorough knowledge of quantitative methods. SAS is the best possible support for such an approach."

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