Business Education Country Trends Revealed in New Research: MBA News

New research into leading graduate business education programs around the world highlights some revealing trends.

The Financial Times has used data taken from its top-ranked business schools to show a country’s proportional contribution to the number of places available on the best MBA, EMBA, master’s in finance and master’s in management programs in the world, as well as showing how many students it provides to the global student-body enrolled on these programs.

Notably, the proportion of students from the emerging markets of India and China is far higher than the number of top-ranked programs available within these countries. Chinese and Indian students make up 10% and 8% of the global student-body respectively. But, of the places available on top-ranked programs only 5% are to be found in China and just 1% in India.

Meanwhile, 34% of the world’s best programs are based within the world’s best-established business education market – the US – but this is backed up by US students making up 21% of the global student-body. 

Disproportionate number of UK students to places provided by UK business schools

The Financial Times focuses on the current experience of UK business schools, which offer a disproportionate number of the top-ranked business education programs compared to the number of UK students taking up places on courses worldwide.

Although UK business schools account for 14% of the programs included in this data, UK students represent just 2% of the global student-body.

Why this is the case and whether the data reveals an underlying problem with the approach taken to management and leadership in the UK is a question for debate. The conclusion drawn in this particular piece is that a lack of funding may be to be blame.

Figures obtained from GMAC indicate that a high number of UK students self-fund their studies relative to elsewhere in the world and that, therefore, there is a far greater onus attached to a program’s return on investment before UK students can consider applying.

There is even a suggestion that producing an insufficient quantity of highly trained managers could be impacting on company effectiveness in the UK.

2012 Research from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), which promotes standards of leadership excellence in the UK, suggests this may be the case. Collaborating with Henley Business School, a survey of 4,500 managers saw 43% rating their own line managers as ineffective or highly ineffective, a factor it believes is integral towards a company’s overall performance.