Tuesday, September 11, 2007

World's Best Schools, Right Here In S'pore

Source : The New Paper, September 11, 2007

Insead and Chicago Business School placed in top 10 of Forbes' rankings

TWO foreign business schools with campuses in Singapore have been ranked among the world's best.

WHAT : Surveys of 18,500 alumni from 102 MBA programmes
REPLIES : 22 per cent
HOW : Compares their salaries pre- and post-MBA


French school Insead is No2 in the Forbes' latest rankings of foreign business schools, under the one-year Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme category.

Insead is the only foreign business school with two full-fledged campuses in different countries - one in France and one in Singapore.

Chicago Business School, which operates a Singapore campus offering the Executive MBA, is No7 in the listings of top US business schools.

It was assessed based on its two-year MBA programme in the US, which costs a total of about US$90,000 ($137,500).

The international curriculum for the school, which also has a campus in London, runs for 21 months and costs up to US$120,000.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

The rankings, in the 3Sep issue of Forbes' magazine, was conducted based on the return on investment that graduates of the class of 2002 received after leaving school. The list (see graphic) is compiled every two years.

The research team sent surveys to 18,500 alumni of 102 MBA programmes, and received replies from 22 per cent, or 4,070of them.

It compares their salaries before they went on the MBA programme and post-MBA.

The top US school in this listing is Dartmouth College (Tuck School of Business), followed by Stanford; while the top foreign business schools for a two-year and one-year programmes are Spain's IESE and Switzerland's IMD respectively.

Insead's MBA - which lasts 10 months and costs 48,800 euros ($101,300 for students here as well) - is even ranked above the MBA programmes offered by leading English universities, Cambridge and Cranfield.

In previous rankings (2005), Chicago was No 3 on the list of top US schools, while Insead was the top foreign business school.

Dean of Insead's MBA Programme Antonio Fatas told The New Paper: 'The comparison with two-year programmes clearly shows the financial advantage of the one-year programme in terms of rate of return.'

Insead MBA graduate Gregory Mittman, 37, said that Insead has an 'uncanny way of recruiting people who are very bright, very unpretentious and a lot of fun'.

GOOD MIX

There is also no dominant group of students, who are from all parts of the world, he said.

Mr Mittman, a Canadian, was a lawyer and a freelance consultant before he took the MBA programme in Singapore in 2003.

He moved here, with his girlfriend (now wife), specifically to do the programme.

He also took up the option of doing part of his course in Insead's other campus in Fontainebleau, near Paris. He spent six months there. Now, he is working in a telco infrastructure company in Singapore as a director of business development.

Ms Rebekah France, 30, who had completed her Insead MBA in Singapore, is now working here in a shipping company as the general manager of marketing & human resources.

Current MBA student Mac Wang, 29, chose Insead because he wanted to be in Asia. An Australian, he had worked in Adelaide in IT project management and also in London as a product manager.

What attracted him to Insead Singapore was 'the full campus in Asia'. In his work group alone, he said there is a French, a Portuguese, a Spaniard and an Indian - all with different working experiences.

One of his coursemates is Miss Cintia Tavella, 28, who used to live in Barcelona, Spain. The business administration and law bachelor degree holder said: 'I love it here.

'It so happened that my sister just moved to India. And my mother (who is in Barcelona) asked: 'What's going on in Asia?' And I told her: 'Everything is going on in Asia!'

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HOW THE SCHOOLS ARE RANKED
TOP FOREIGN BUSINESS SCHOOLS

Two-year programmes
1) IESE (Spain)
2) London (UK)
3) Manchester (UK)

One-year programmes
1) IMD (Switzerland)
2) Insead (France and S'pore)
3) Cambridge - Judge Business School (UK)

THE TOP US BUSINESS SCHOOLS
1) Dartmouth College (Tuck School of Business)
2)Stanford
3) Harvard
4) Virginia (Darden School of Business)
5) Pennsylvania (Wharton School)
6) Columbia
7) Chicago
8) Yale
9) Northwestern (Kellogg School of Management)
10) Cornell (The Johnson School)

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