Back to School - Second Part
ADDRESSING A NEED
As the McKinsey numbers suggest, China needs all the quality business education options it can get. Unlike in the West, where an undergraduate degree in a business-related field followed by an MBA is considered a typical journey up the career ladder, many Chinese executives have no business education background.
“When they started their careers there were no such things as MBAs or business schools in China,” pointed out Liang Neng, director of CEIBS’s EMBA program. Plenty of them never even attended college. Many do not speak English, and some have never left the country. The CEIBS website mentions that participants will need to know how to use a personal computer.
On the other hand, Chinese EMBA students tend to be more experienced than their western counterparts. The average student at HEC Schools of Management’s EMBA program in Beijing is 43. By contrast, the average age of this year’s EMBA class at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school, the number one American EMBA program in this year’s Financial Times ranking, is 33.Chinese students are also on the whole more senior than the middle-level managers that dominate EMBA programs in the West
