(Photo credit: Nils Geylen)
Starting this weekend, we will post a weekly digest of links to analysis or opinion articles from other websites and blogs that we feel might enrich both your knowledge and perspective about business education. We will try to cover the best of all prolific writing out there in the online beyond and hope that it helps you stay on top of things.
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Business education has globalised more thoroughly than business itself, observes this week’s Schumpeter column in The Economist. Not only are b-schools opening campuses on their corresponding other sides of the world, the top 55 American b-schools have 34% international students in their classrooms and while the top 55 European b-schools have 84% international students. An interesting fallout of this is,
“As business education becomes more global, it is becoming less American. Until recently the field was dominated by American business schools teaching American examples. Now more than a third of the case studies taught in strategy courses in American universities feature foreign firms. And of the Asians who took the GMAT tests (which American schools use to choose their students), the proportion who then applied to study in America dropped from 85% in 2001 to 67% in 2009.”
But globalisation has drawbacks. An article in the Financial Times about the growing business education market in Dubai calls out the fall in quality as too many international b-schools try to tame the region.
“In a rush to grab a slice of what has been seen as an increasingly lucrative market, European institutions such as London Business School, Manchester, Bradford and Strathclyde have set up facilities in Dubai, while Insead has teaching facilities in Abu Dhabi and HEC Paris in Qatar. Executive education specialists such as Ashridge and Cranfield are also jockeying for business. Indeed, on one floor in the DIFC three normally competing business schools LBS, Cass and Duke, from the US sit cheek by jowl.”
The schools are realising that middle easterners do not understand the value of business education the way Europeans or North Americans do. India is up next in line to become the higher education haven, after the government opens it up to foreign investors. If these b-schools start up in India, they will face a totally different challenge — that of justifying high tuition fee against a backdrop of nearly 50 established homegrown b-schools that offer 2-year MBA degrees under Rs 15 lakhs.
Businessweek reports that post-recession, the US job market void created by bankrupt investment banks such as Lehmann Brothers is being filled up by companies such as Apple and Amazon, which have in the past couple of years scooped larger number of students from b-schools such as Duke-Fuqua, Berkeley-Haas and Northwestern-Kellogg. The article also spots the trend of an increasing number of employers hiring just one or two students per b-school.
“A breakdown of job offers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business illustrates this tendency, says Pulin Sanghvi, assistant dean and director of the Career Management Center at Stanford. Last year, 80 percent of the school’s employers hired only one student each and 12 percent hired only two students each, he says.”
Back home, MJ Xavier, the opinionated Director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ranchi turns Jairam Ramesh’s controversial “IIT/IIMs have word class students but not world class faculty” utterance upside down and questions whether the IIMs even have world class students.
“Today, coaching institutes make more money than the IITs and IIMs. They thrive on the demand-supply gap for quality education in this country. Students are ready to pay any amount to get coached for entry into these prestigious institutions. They, in turn, teach short-cuts and quick-fix methods to crack the entrance examinations. A person of above-average intelligence can be coached for 95+ percentile score, if he/she takes the entrance test many times. While it is a fact that we have students that do not deserve a seat, we also miss out on a number of bright ones who should have made it to the IIMs.”
He joins an increasing number of b-school leaders who have lately been directly or indirectly questioning the output of the Common Admissions Test (CAT). The test, which in the past three years has lost nearly 30% of its test takers, though has an optimistic convener at the helm this year. Speaking to Business Standard, IIM Calcutta’s Janakiraman Moorthy expects a 5 to 10 % revival in CAT enrollments. This year’s testing window may not be too different from that of CAT 2010, he adds.
Many challenges have been taken care of since the first two computer-based tests. The one challenge that remains is of conducting the CAT in such a short testing window of 20 days for such a large number of students. We may not be able to change that this year but making CAT a round-the-year is the way forward, Moorthy adds.”
Do share other articles and blogs that you think might help your fellow readers broaden their horizons.