Insead out?

monacopig

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10567518

Jan 24th 2008 | LONDON AND PARIS
From The Economist print edition


    

TIME was when INSEAD in Fontainebleau,
near Paris, was the top business school in Europe, with no competition.
In Europe the only schools that could call themselves rivals were the
London Business School (LBS) and IMD in Switzerland. Its one-year MBA
course is still famous for the experience of mixing with students from
a wide range of countries. Internationally, it holds its head up with
the top American schools, and its 33,000 alumni form a powerful network
covering the top echelons of global business. But now the heat is on
for INSEAD, as a crowd of rivals has come forward, including a new, generously funded school in Berlin.

    

HEC, the original French business school in Paris, with a proud 127-year history, now tops the latest Financial Times ranking of European schools, ahead of both INSEAD and LBS. In another ranking of the world's top 100 business schools by the Economist Intelligence Unit* (a sister company of The Economist), INSEAD comes 17th. That puts it behind seven other European institutions, including Barcelona's IESE, Madrid's Instituto de Empresa and Cambridge University's Judge Business School, which all make it into the top 15.

One INSEAD insider says that the school
is “rattled” by the latest rankings and by all the new competition. The
school is obsessed with rankings, says an employee. Much management
time goes on “gaming” the ratings to ensure a good score. The EIU rankings
are based on student surveys asking about career openings, the overall
educational experience, salary effect and networking potential. Those
of the Financial Times look mainly at return on investment, in terms of the boost to a salary. Soumitra Dutta, dean of external relations at INSEAD,
says that rankings “are not always most helpful” because of all the
different methodologies used. In other words, they are a nuisance.

    

This week 30 executives from 13 different countries are entering their fourth month of the first executive MBA course at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin (ESMT). Germany only got round to founding an international business school in 2002, and started small MBA classes two years ago. To be sure, a class of 30 students is puny compared with the 920 going through INSEAD this year. INSEAD's joint campus (it runs a parallel school in Singapore), has 143 teachers compared with ESMT's
22. But the infant German institution has the financial support to
triple the size of its faculty within five years. Its backers span the
alphabet of leading firms from Allianz and Axel Springer through BMW, Bayer and Bosch to Siemens and ThyssenKrupp. The president of ESMT is Lars-Hendrik Röller, a former INSEAD
professor with a distinguished academic career on both sides of the
Atlantic. He says the strength of the new school will be business and
its interaction with technology and public policy.

    

INSEAD also had money on its mind when it
appointed a new dean in 2005. Frank Brown is an American and a former
partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers. A former INSEAD
board member, his brief as dean was to raise more finance for a school
that has always struggled against the financial heft of the Americans.
So far, says Mr Dutta, he has already raised some €170m of the €200m
which the school wants to find by 2010.

    

INSEAD, LBS and IMD
face new threats beyond uppity rivals like the Spanish schools and the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge (both late to embrace business,
but rich and rising fast). The forthcoming harmonisation of European
university education, under what is known as the Bologna Accord, could
also upset them. Europe's universities will soon all adopt a uniform
Anglo-Saxon system of bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees. This is
designed to produce greater movement of students around Europe, and has
already generated 299 new management masters degree courses that
students can follow straight after an undergraduate degree. It was HEC's success in these courses which helped it beat all the other business schools in the FT rankings. INSEAD and the other established names no doubt look down their noses at them—but perhaps at their peril.

nnm

1, the FT ranking mentioned was ranking of schools as a whole. HEC is the only one (or two) that has all undergrad/MBA/EMBA/....

2, the Economist ranking of MBA ranked Harvard 13th, Wharton 21th etc etc, INSEAD's 17th is not bad, hahaha

anyway, rankings are jokes, just look at the career reports and salary figures

not much else you should put into consideration when choosing MBA

ESeraph

有竞争是好事，不过短期内新兴起的学校还是不能撼动insead, LBS和IMD的领先地位

seanbb

2, the Economist ranking of MBA ranked Harvard 13th, Wharton 21th etc etc, INSEAD's 17th is not bad, hahaha

Very strong argument,  how u recently? Fly around to networking?  ;-)

[此贴子已经被作者于2008-1-26 0:00:48编辑过]

RickZhen

looks like some pr issue with the publisher. can't say it's obviously biased but the wording is quite harsh.  "The school is obsessed with rankings, says an employee. Much management time goes on “gaming” the ratings to ensure a good score."