Strength Weaknesses Opportunities Threats (SWOT) Analysis on Brock University PDF

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Professor Mark Parker had us do a Strength Weaknesses Opportunities Threats (SWOT) Analysis on Brock University and this was one of the mandatory essay type assignments...

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Student Name: MD Dhrubo Student number: 6857072

Course Code: MGMT-1P93 Section number: S03

Assignment # 2 – Brock University SWOT Analysis The purpose of this analysis that I have written is to describe why Brock is a suitable option as an educational institution. As an aspiring student wanting to major in accounting who just finished his grade 12 exams, I found out Brock has a CPA Pathway in its business school. [BU, Goodman School Of Business, MAcc] The Goodman School of Business in Brock University has the option to graduate as an accounting major in one of its many programs and then every student has the option to become a Chartered Professional Accountant. This CPA pathway offered by Goodman is exactly the reason why I chose Brock as my College. Further on, I will conduct a SWOT analysis on Brock university as a whole. This analysis will discuss the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of Brock university compared to the others. First and foremost, I will discuss Brock’s strengths and weaknesses. One of the strengths of Brock university is that it has one of the most prestigious business schools across all of Canada. The faculty in this business school has some highly skilled professionals with ample knowledge over each of the subjects they teach. These professors are heavily compensated for each of the 4 th year courses they teach. Several tenured professors such as Joseph Kushner in the department of Economics are one of the best professors in Canada as they have been teaching for nearly half a decade. [BU, News, Prof Joseph Kushner recognized for 50 years at Brock and $50,000 student award donation] This proves the strength of the Business School and its heavy budget being used in ensuring the Faculty maintains its quality of education, which is crucial for every student being taught. Another strength of Brock university is its well-designed modern campus. This has proved to students like me, that having an up-to-date campus like the one in Brock makes every class accessible by every student at the shortest possible time. There are applications on phones that direct students to each classroom, the designing, the pathway, the hallways, all of these takes little to no walking; and everything happens indoors. This played a key role for first year students like me during winter when people had to walk around a lot. According to the SWOT analysis, weaknesses are also important to find the positioning of the organization being analyzed to identify areas of improvement. An apparent weakness of Brock University is its image, and by image we mean to say its position in most of the world university Rankings. Even though Brock has one of the top business schools, somehow, according to most evaluations, its social status seems to fall behind due to its other faculties. It has led to much speculation among many parents considering Brock to be a “Party School” and causing idioms such as “If you can pick up a rock, you can go to Brock” to arise. Of course, this is all but speculation and none of this can be found as part of statistics anywhere out there. However, it is my experience and my own insight that has led me to acquire such information. The second weakness about Brock University is its placing in the Niagara Region. Across all of Canada, all the major universities of Ontario are placed in places such as the heart of Toronto (considering Ryerson, York and UofT). Other big universities like Western and Waterloo are in their respective cities where the population is either dense (like a metropolitan) or the population consists mostly of students. Thereby, making these universities located in places where jobs are readily available for graduates to seek from. In the case of Brock, its located in the city of St Catharines where jobs are not as accessible to students as they would be in places like Toronto. The population of St. Catharines is very low compared to the other cities, making the “University experience” relatively boring, compared to students at other universities living in more populated areas. This could be a threat, and therefore since we are conducting a SWOT analysis, it will be discussed accordingly in the next paragraph. To speak of the university’s opportunities, we can first start by working on improving the faculty of professional teachers and professors across the university’s other programs and areas of study. Thorough analysis needs to be conducted to find out why many computer science graduates tend to move away to other, better universities each year. One of the reasons is because some of the courses are not well designed. This can also be another opportunity, where the designing of the courses could be improved by removing those professors which do not communicate well with the students or teach the course materials

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Student Name: MD Dhrubo Student number: 6857072

Course Code: MGMT-1P93 Section number: S03

Assignment # 2 – Brock University SWOT Analysis at all and simply read through the lectures without explaining any of the textbook in detail. There was a course in my first year which was about Data analytics, the lady who taught us the course was from Ryerson, an accomplished graduate. However, most of the students in her class, either dropped the course or moved on to another professor. The same year I took the same course again, under another professor but this time all the students of his class understood what they were studying. Discovering these things and finding out the weak links will be key to improving the overall quality of education. Therefore, we now approach the threats of Brock university. Put simply, the threats are the other universities like University of Toronto, McMaster university etc. These universities have much bigger endowments, have much bigger research output and far more programs available compared to Brock university. When students look for universities to go to (including international ones), they easily tend to pick the bigger ones compared to low end universities like Brock due to the negative public insight. As such, these threats really put Brock behind compared to most universities in Canada. Another threat to Brock university is the Covid-19 pandemic. As more and more international students were rejected to travel and live in Canada to pursue their education, the lesser the number of international students who have managed to enroll themselves in Brock. International students pay up to 3 times the price for a course as a domestic Canadian student. This makes up for much of the revenue of Brock that the university is dependent upon. Students staying at the residence is also another source of income the pandemic has deprived Brock of. All in all, after conducting a SWOT analysis upon Brock University we have discovered the main strength being the business School; the weakness being its terrible reputation among other universities; the opportunities being improving the number of professors to improve the quality of education; and the key threats being the other high-ranking universities of Canada. One thing that I have learned about Brock University while conducting my research to carry out the analysis was that Brock university is located on the hunting grounds of indigenous tribes which is also now seen as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve on the Niagara Escarpment. [BU, articles, UNESCO Biosphere Reserve]

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