Business school boom faces challenge with skills demand 2006-10-11 18:54:17

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Business school boom faces challenge with skills demand
Tan Weiyun

2006-09-14
WITH China's economy heating up to new levels in recent years, this has created enormous demand for top professionals with managerial skills and expertise. To meet this demand, business schools offering MBA programs are mushrooming overnight at an accelerated speed on the mainland.

At present, 96 universities have set up MBA programs and more than 1,000 institutions have opened business management schools. The number of enrolled MBA students has reach more than 40,000.

Walking into any classroom at a China business school, a person will find a majority of yellow faces and the occasional uttering of Mandarin. What is suprising to find is that everything, including the subject matter, course books and reading materials are usually in English. In addition, the teachers are virtually the same as those of their US and European counterparts.

In April, Forbes China released its "China's Most Valuable Business School" research report which assessed 50 business schools in the country. The US business publication listed the top-10 full-time MBA and the top-25 part-time MBA that provided "the fastest salary increase of the graduates."

The statistics revealed that the annual income of a full-time MBA student who graduated in 2002 reached 240,000 yuan (US$30,000) on average, about 3.75 times greater than he or she received before studying for the business program.

Wage to triple

In contrast, a part-time MBA student's average yearly income jumped to 187,000 yuan, triple what he or she earned four years after graduation.

Apart from the big salary increase, MBAs also gave students a leg up in rising through an enterprise, especially in a multinational company.

The report said that before MBA study, only 22.4 percent of students served among top-level management; within four years after graduation, the figure soared to 50.5 percent. Many have now become members of their company's board or have been promoted to chief executive officer.

It is estimated that China will require 75,000 top-level executives with global experience by 2010, about 70,000 more than it has now.

Seeing a vast demand for China's managerial classes and business schools, more and more Western educational institutions have flocked to China to establish the programs.

Cooperation with foreign schools has been a popular mode on the mainland and it is regarded as a quick way to develop many of the country's unproven business schools.

For example, Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, Fudan University's School of Management and Sun Yat-sen University's Lingnan College all chose to collaborate with the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world's leading business schools.

In the Forbes top-10 list, six of the business schools have international MBA programs. Guangzhou-based Lingnan College, for instance, which was approved by the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council this year to set up its full-time MBA program, ranked a surprising third.

With a global vision and English-language tutorial, Lingnan graduates are popular among many transnational enterprises. Forbes reported 54 percent worked for foreign companies after graduation with an initial salary offer of 127,000 yuan on average.

Distinctiveness

This was an increase of 83.4 percent, a dramatic jump compared with what they earned before their MBA study.

Some other schools in the top 25 part-time MBA list, despite not having a Western institution to collaborate with, also performed well due to their distinctiveness.

Ranked in second place was the Antai School of Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It distinguished itself for its financial and high-tech MBA programs. The school of Management of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, which boasts a cutting-edge accounting MBA program, rocketed from 20th last year to eighth this year. The graduates of these schools were often offered higher initial salaries of 143,000 yuan and 145,000 yuan respectively, according to the report.

Still, the boom in the country's business schools is not without problems. Beyond the ranked schools which are considered top tier, the status quo of those schools less known is not that encouraging. Many are taught in Mandarin by poorly trained Chinese faculty while others are no more than diploma mills or cash registers.

Rigid course settings are also a problem among such schools. Students don't have much choice for the optional courses they are interested in, a situation hampering their management skills to a large extent.

More than 60 percent of schools investigated paid little attention to the construction of their alumni network. But some have realized its importance.

By holding meetings on a regular basis and referring graduates to work in its alumni's companies, this network can be a great platform; students and alumni can be exposed to up-to-date information from both the job market and the business field.

However, it will take China time to create world-class MBA programs and business schools of quality.
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