Educating the new generation of decision makers in China

The School of Economics and Management (SEM) is the largest school of the Tsinghua University of Beijing. With 4,300 students in 2004, the business school educates 15 percent of the total number of students at Tsinghua across the major disciplines in business, including management science and engineering, finance and international trade, accounting, and marketing. The majority of the school's non-MBA undergraduates continue their academic education and eventually obtain their Ph.D.s or master's degrees. SEM also has various research centers that contribute to the development of management knowledge for business: the China Center for Financial Research, the National Center for Economic Research and the Wal-Mart Retail Research Center, to name a few.

Besides the academic students, the school has been training a large number of professionals through various management update programs. Recent articles in Fortune magazine highlighted how SEM is attracting the best and the brightest in China and emphasized the school's role in transforming the country from a planned economy into a market economy. The Wall Street Journal acclaimed Tsinghua, among other top universities in China, for its MBA programs that are educating China's business elite during an era of crucial economic development.

One of the core aspects of management is decision-making. For this reason, SEM strives to educate the new generation of decision makers in China. The school acknowledges that SAS is one of the key software products that future decision makers will use in industry, and therefore integrating SAS into their programs is a major asset. The school insists that SAS education can give students a competitive advantage in their future management roles.

Using SAS as companion software for MBA studies
Dr. Qun (Trent) Xie is an associate professor of business statistics and assistant director for MBA Academic Affairs. He obtained his Ph.D. in statistics from Yale University in the United States. His extensive background in the financial industry enables him to see the bridge between the academic and commercial worlds. According to Dr. Xie, the concept of statistics must be understood and the students should be "good with numbers." They should be able to interpret data, because that is what is required in the industry. Therefore most of the departments use SAS and all statistics courses across all levels either integrate or introduce SAS as the assisting statistical analysis tool. "We even use SAS as companion software for our MBA program," explains Dr. Xie.

Extensive use of SAS in teaching, research and student work
SAS was introduced over five years ago at the business school. Usage has recently soared. "Returnees" are coming back to give lectures, bringing with them their experience with SAS in the United States or other Western countries. In addition, the need for quantitative research has been rising in China. As a result the school uses SAS extensively in teaching, research and student work.

The Finance Department is the stronghold for the SAS application where it is mostly used for financial data processing and empirical research. Other departments using SAS include the Management Science and Engineering Department for statistical modeling and data mining, the Economics Department for econometrics and the Marketing Department for marketing research.

SAS courses are taught at all levels at the business school, which allows the students to follow a complete SAS education path. Undergraduate students receive practical SAS exposure combined with undergraduate research work using SAS. Graduate students perform advanced research in marketing and accounting and can attend an advanced analytics course. MBA students acquire data mining skills for decision making using SAS Enterprise Miner software. Student's research topics in MBA include Basel and risk management issues such as "Credit Line in Compliance with Basel Accord" and "Risk Management on Export Insurance."

Research centers at SEM have conducted numerous research projects using SAS in the areas of accounting, finance, management science and marketing. Examples of such projects are: "A New Stock Market Risk Measure and Applications" (finance), "Credit Modeling Methods" (management science), and "Consumer Preference and Purchase of Notebook" (marketing).

A direct return from the SAS skills
Beyond the statistical teaching and research needs, SAS is used by students to work on their theses and course reports, to submit papers to scholastic journals and to perform regular on-campus practical work.

MBA/graduate students often take summer internships. Most companies that recruit on campus prefer students to have good knowledge of SAS because students are immediately more productive and companies can directly benefit from their SAS skills.

Making better decisions
More and more Chinese companies have started consolidating and analyzing their data. Quantitative analysis is becoming a trend and the need for analytical resources is growing fast. The business school clearly wants to continue providing companies with graduates who are capable of understanding statistical thinking and interpreting data to make the right decisions with expected results. "MBA students need to know how to use data and to have analytical capabilities before joining the work force in order to make better decisions," comments Dr. Xie.

Now, SEM plans to synchronize all departments on SAS teaching and research so as to "make the best use of this great software." The school is determined to expand the collaboration with SAS to ensure that the courses are always designed to explore the latest contemporary business issues and to pursue its objective of arming the students with the right expertise for the commercial world.

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