[photopress:earlystudents_1.jpg,full,alignright]Trying to track down the origins of the business school in China, or anywhere else, is not that easy. A dateline:
1872. In France, Sciences-Po was training for leadership service. Not an MBA and not, in most peoples opinion, a true starting point but that is arguable.
1881. The Chamber of commerce and Industry of Paris founded École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC), probably the first business school in Europe.
1881. In the same year it is generally agreed that the first American business school, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was established (initially as an exclusively undergraduate institution).
1900. Tuck School of Business, part of Dartmouth College, was the first graduate school of management in the US. Starting in 1900, it was the first institution to confer advanced degrees (masters) in commercial sciences, which you can think of as the MBA before it was relabelled.
1907. HEC Montréal was founded as Canada’s first school of management.
1909. The Stockholm School of Economics was founded and this was a serious business school although the term MBA was not used.
After that a deluge of universities offering similar courses. Not all of them resulting in the letters MBA.
1964. University College Dublin became the first European university to offer the MBA degree.
1968. Founding of the Asian Institute of Management.
[photopress:unigraduates_1_2.jpg,full,alignright]1994. CEIBS established in 1994 as a joint venture between the European Commission and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation in Beijing. This was the first business school in China. It was later moved to Shanghai, where it spent its first years in Jiaotong University’s Minhang campus. Now it is in Shanghai’s Pudong district, a small yet striking complex designed by the great architect I.M. Pei, who, among many other things, was responsible for the glass pyramid at the entrace to The Louvre.
According to the Financial Times this year, 2006, CEIBS is the top MBA program in Asia-Pacific and 21st in the world. Its EMBA — Executive MBA for executives with business experience — is ranked third in the world by the FT and is the largest in the worldwith 700 students spread across China.
2000. The first MBA class, jointly sponsored by Tibet Autonomous Region and Sichuan University, was opened in Tibet.