Passport To Business Education Beyond The United States

(MBA50.com) The US might have been the home of modern business education, but the idea of it holding a monopoly on the sector has long been assigned to the waste basket of history. Find a continent (or even a country) these days without a recognizable business school and you must be in line for some sort of prize.

So what is happening in business education outside the US that sets it apart?

What is interesting in this year’s Forbes international MBA ranking is how schools in the established economies of the developed world continue to dominate the market. Despite the ongoing problems of its economy, Spain, for example, still manages to field three schools in the top twenty, while Europe as a whole contributes no less than nine to the top ten. Financial muscle and potential may be leaching out of the west to the south and east, according to commentators, but new powerhouses such as India, mainland China and even the whole of Latin America can only manage one school each in the listing.

At first sight this may suggest that the appetite for formal business education in the emerging nations is lagging behind, but nothing could be further from the truth. The next generation of professionals and managers is embracing the business school experience enthusiastically, but is still boarding planes to do it. However, in many instances their mid to long term agenda has changed. Rather than look for a job in their alma mater’s home country, as used to be the case, they are heading home again with their brand new qualification. Why? Simply because they perceive that this is where the real action, the real opportunity lies, not in the sluggish or ailing economies of the developed world.

Given how much emphasis the Forbes ranking puts on return on investment, how do those who opt to study outside the US approach ROI?

While the cost of an MBA program at any of the listed schools can’t help but focus candidates on future earnings, there’s no doubt that overseas schools, and particularly those in Europe, are trying to show that personal success and the wider good are not mutually exclusive. For example, The Skoll Centre at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School is recognised as one of the leading international evangelists for social entrepreneurship, INSEAD is a champion of what it terms ‘impact investing’ and the MBA at IE Madrid has a heavy social innovation emphasis. ROI, in such cases, may perhaps need to be measured in contribution to the well-being of society at large as much as the level of earnings several years after graduation.

Around the globe students appear confident enough in the value of formal business education that they are willing to invest, not just in the conventional MBA, but also in other forms of the b-school experience. Saïd’s 1+1 program is a prominent example of the joint approach which allows students to combine an MBA with a masters in a wide range of complementary areas, from criminology to computer science to biodiversity. And Europe is also seeing a boom in pre-experience master’s programs which bring candidates onto school campuses more or less straight from their first degrees. The CEMS Masters in International Management program, for example, originally founded by three schools in the Forbes ranking – SDA Bocconi, HEC Paris and ESADE (plus the University of Cologne) - now embraces nearly 30 schools around the globe and over 1000 students every year.

So it seems that outside the US, despite the gloomy predictions of recent years, the MBA and the growing number of other business masters options are not just surviving, but thriving. Reports of the death of business education have been greatly exaggerated.