Asian B-Schools Benefit From Stable Economy

Even a decade ago, it was mighty challenging to defend the proposition that Asia is increasingly becoming a preferred destination for management education. Today it is easier.

The primary reason for aspiring managers to home in on Asia as their education destination is that MBA Colleges in the continent are providing the same quality of education and multi- cultural environment as their western counterparts— and at a hugely competitive fee structure. It is also creating unprecedented job opportunities for new management graduates.

A multi-cultural environment has become the biggest positive for Asia’s top business schools. In 2004, over 18,500 international students from different nationalities took admission in 90 MBA programmes in China. Today, about a third of the students in China’s top 25- 30 MBA Courses are of foreign origin.

The story is not any different in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. Unsurprisingly, MBA applications in Asian schools have gone up, even as those in the West have declined.

The trend is not different in the case of placement opportunities. Employment at the time of graduation in top American business schools, including Harvard, Chicago (Booth), Stanford and Boston, vary from 68.4 per cent to 76.3 per cent; three months after graduation, placement percentages go up between 86 per cent and 92.4 per cent.

In contrast, about 80 per cent of students in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) who completed their programme this June, have already found placements in top companies.

And a McKinsey & Co. report estimated that China would have consumed 75,000 senior executive positions in 2010. The surge in economic activities has pushed up the demand for qualified managers. Singapore is one destination favoured by future managers.

Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey has ranked it as Asia’s best city. It also has Asia’s best infrastructure and tops in ease of doing business. This positive perception encourages more MNCs to open offices in Singapore, thereby creating more job opportunities for new management graduates.

Asian economies are doing better and so are their educational institutions. Not very long ago, the inclusion of Mao Zedong’s economic philosophy was obligatory in the curriculum of Chinese universities, but they could not expose their students to western thinkers such as Adam Smith, Max Weber and Milton Friedman. Today, that is hardly the case.

The number of Asian B-Schools has also gone up with time. Among the top 200 world universities, 25 are from Asia. China has five business schools in the elite of 40 of the QS Global Top Business Schools 2009. And the most heartening fact is that what Asian universities have achieved in a decade, it took the west 50 years.