[photopress:harvard.jpg,full,alignright]For the moment focus not on education but on money. Data collected for the Financial Times ranking of global MBA programs shows that a good MBA brings a good salary. Three years after graduation, alumni from the classes of 2001, 2002 and 2003 (the information supplied by these alumni three years after their graduation) report substantial salaries and salary increases.
Increasingly, a gulf is emerging between the top business schools and the also-rans.
The majority of new programs are usually shorter than the two-year gold standard MBA taught in the US, with many offering one-year programs. And these shorter programs are proving their worth. In the FT rankings this year five of the top 15 schools have programs shorter than the 20 to 24-month model.
These range from Insead, with its 10-month programme, to Ceibs in Shanghai, which runs an 18-month programme.
What is undoubtedly true is that the full-time MBA is an increasingly global product. According to GMAC, business schools have seen a rise in international applications. A small but growing trend is the increase in the number of US applicants to non-US schools.
However, there is the subject of money which looms so large in everything.
The older universities in the United States have an underlying support system of financial endowments given by grateful ex-scholars who benefitted from their education.
A scan of the top 10 schools in the 2007 FT rankings shows that the eight US schools on the list have an endowment of at least US$200m — Harvard Business School has more than US$2bn.
The Chinese universities simply do not compete in any way at these levels and although they need to setup research centers in leadership, corporate responsibility they also need the endowments — or government funding — to do it. At the moment neither are available in sufficient quantities.
Source: Financial Express