A recent report by Kaplan gives us an unexpected piece of boasting by admissions committee members of 124 American business schools: all of them unanimously agree that their universities provide better management and business administration programs than their European or Asian counterparts.
Since 2014, when this survey was first conducted, even more admissions officers started claiming that the U.S. education was best in the world.
Of course, the European business schools have something to say in this matter. Spanish director of admissions, Itziar de Ros Raventos, says that the results of the Kaplan survey feel ‘biased’. Others purport that American b-schools make their students very US-centric – and this for a much larger cost than the universities overseas.
Why Are American B-Schools Better?
According to Brian Carlidge, the Kaplan executive director, there are no less than three reasons for such an unprecedented boost. Firstly, according to him, U.S. admissions officers feel proud of their programs and alumni. Secondly, they believe that their programs are the most innovative out there. Thirdly, Carlidge believes that U.S. b-school representatives may just be ‘unfamiliar’ with overseas university programs.
Carlidge thinks that in claiming that the U.S. schools are best, their representatives might mean that European graduates would be underqualified to work in the USA – not in their countries of origin, of course. All in all, while it’s difficult to compare American schools with European and Asian universities directly, the general opinion is that U.S. degrees are ‘slightly better’, even though the graduates of all these schools would be equal to employers.
U.S. Schools Report Higher Salaries For Alumni
Of course, if we remember about starting salaries for MBA graduates, American business schools beat all their competitors: among the 12 world’s top salaries for MBAs, 8 places belong to U.S. b-schools. In the top five, there is only one Asian school – the Indian Institute of Management.
Still, the abovementioned survey might just have somewhat skewed results: admissions officers who responded were asked only their opinion on American schools. There was no question of comparing them to European or Asian universities. That’s how the results were obtained.
Europeans, taken aback with such claims, proceeded to state that they have much respect for their colleagues overseas, but that said colleagues might be biased. U.S. universities are known to be very America-centric and not really global. This last statement is unfortunately true: European business schools can boast a much higher percentage of international students (IE business school’s MBA program has about 90% of foreign participants, and London Business School has similar results, offering education to people from 70 countries of the world). Meanwhile, American b-schools have much lower rates in this area: in Stanford, only 40% of students are international, and in Harvard this quantity is even lower – just 35%.
It is also quite worth mentioning that American business schools’ popularity and prestige are starting to drop considerably due to President Donald Trump’s new legislation projects concerning immigrants, which has had an unfortunate impact on international MBA students. Hence, European universities (especially non-British ones, due to Brexit) are enjoying a rise in popularity, and in several years the tide might be turned completely.
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