MBA Programs & Schools - A brief sketch

 

Since its inception around a century ago in Dartmouth College, USA, the Master degree in Business Administration (MBA) has gradually evolved into the most prominent academic title for the professionals and practitioners in the commercial world. Although its original was to sought out the scientific approaches to management, it now more emphasizes itself on the professional training accompanied by scientific approaches and mindsets, with a full blown extension of subjects covering all areas of commercial and economic reality, from the traditional sectors like marketing, finance, human resource, to the cutting-edge technology management, supply chain / logistic / value-chain, and knowledge management.

At its birth place --- North America, MBAs have established a full blown structure with mature sectors as academia, students, professors, employers and all related service industries, like examination institutions, application advisory, MBA job-hunting services etc. Over the last century, some hundreds of MBA schools had been established and abandoned in America. With all the com-and-go, some schools have come to the horizon and popular culture as the elite ones, who would dominate the MBA playground for a certain time in the future. Any newbie MBA programs and schools would have hard of wrestling with them if not focusing on niche markets. The most notable MBA programs and schools in USA are so called the Magic-Seven (or M7 in short), which consist of the follow seven schools:

•         Harvard Business School;
•         The Wharton School ,  University of Pennsylvania;
•   Columbia Business School;
•         MIT Sloan School of Management;
•         Stanford Graduate School of Business; 
•         Booth School of Business, University of Chicago;
•         Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Although each European country has its own traditional degrees, programs and systems in economics, business and management education, since 1960’s, European commercial leaders and government officials tried to counter the economic rivalry of the Northern America by copying the American style business schools as well as the postgraduate business education, the MBA degree. Under this initiative, a handful of American-like postgraduate business schools had been established across Europe, from Netherlands, Belgium to UK, France, except the German-speaking world. Since 1990’s, when many Asian students started flooding into European business schools to seek a MBA title, many traditional European universities echoed by offering English-speaking MBA programs, and the number of MBA programs and schools soar enormously. Among the hundreds of MBA programs in Europe, some really stand out as the most prominiant names, the so-called Big Three:

•          London Business School;
•          Insead (INStitut Européen d'ADministration des Affaires, or European Institute of Business Administration) in Fontainebleau, France ;
•          IMD (International Institute of Management Development), Lausanne, Switzerland.

Since 1990’s, with the international finance, trade and globalization, MBA degrees became highly sought after in the developing world, namely Asia, South America and Africa. Echoing to this soaring demand for highly educated business managers and professionals, many Asian universities started cooperating with the Western counterparts in offering Western-style MBA education programs to the local managers of the Multinational companies.  The most notable one is CEIBS ---China Europe International Business School, among many other excellent programs.

This is but a brief portrait of the MBA programs. Yet how to choose a good one or the most suitable one is still a big question to answer. 

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