Santiago Iniguez - Dean IE Business School

How Strong is the Brand “Europe” in Higher Education?

I am surprised at the fact that the marketing of European higher education does not seem to be in the agenda of the EU. This is a key issue, since it is hoped that the implementation of the Bologna Accord will increase the number of non-European students coming to study at European universities. Europe is an attractive continent for different reasons, some of the more frequently mentioned being diversity, cultural traditions and history. In fact, Europe was the cradle of the first Western World universities, almost eight centuries ago, many of which still stand today. However, is the brand “Europe” more appealing to non-European prospective university students than other alternative continents?

Earlier this year, the Academic Co-operation Association (ACA), a non-for-profit for the improvement of education in Europe, published the extremely interesting report “Perceptions of European Higher education in Third Countries”. Let me summarise some of its interesting conclusions:

Europe has increased in the past years its share of foreign university students but the US is still the leading destination and Australia is climbing positions quickly. In particular, although Europe has a good standing in Latin America, it lacks the recognition that the US or Australia enjoys among Asian prospective students.

The most successful European countries in attracting foreign students are UK, Germany and France. Europe is seen, according to the report, as “a range of very different countries”.

Information on European higher education offerings seem to be missing or hard to access. The report mentions the lack of rankings and of information that may make the market more knowable, transparent and comparable.  This is something that I have dealt with abundantly in previous posts since a basic requirement for the success of Bologna is the development of an effective information market.

The report also recommends the support of a European brand and the coordination of marketing campaigns. I have some doubts here. In order to enhance the visibility of European higher education and to attract more foreign students there may be two alternative strategies. The first one is investing in the promotion of the generic brand, i.e. “Europe”. The second one is to promote the best brands in European education, i.e. those universities or business schools with worldwide recognition, in order to position European education with premium brands and high quality and hence support the generic brand. The latest Financial Times MBA Ranking, listing the leading b-schools in Europe, has done more for European management education than many other marketing campaigns promoting European management. Given the fragmentation of European higher education I would recommend the second strategy to EU marketing officers.   

Which Countries Will Be Favoured by Post-Bologna Students?

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa    

One of the most  exciting consequences of the Bologna Accord is  the increase of cross-border movements of students inside Europe  and,  expectedly, the higher number of students from other continents  that  will come to study in Europe. What will be the countries with  more  appeal to attract those prospective students?

Recently, the  European Commission published the latest stats on the Erasmus  Programme that throw interesting conclusions about this. As you know, ERASMUS is   the scholarship programme run by the EU that promotes the cross-border   exchange of university students in Europe.

Table 1. Number  of Outgoing ERASMUS Students by Home Country (top six countries)

Country	2003/04	2004/05
Germany	20,688	22,427
France	20,981	21,561
Spain	20,034	20,819
Italy	16,829	16,440
Poland	6,276	8,390
UK	7,539	7,214

Table 2. Number  of Incoming ERASMUS Students by Host Country (top six countries)

Country	2003/04	2004/05
Spain	24,049	25,511
France	20,260	20,519
Germany	16,863	17,273
UK	16,621	16,266
Ireland	12,713	13,370
Netherlands	6,724	6,842

 

Let me comment some interesting evidences from those numbers:

First, Spain has become for the first time this year- the first country in terms of reception of foreign students.

Second, Language is a key factor in selecting the country where to study and English is the preferred “lingua franca”. Interestingly, Ireland is the most remarkable net receiver of foreign students, with only 1,572 outgoing students in 2005 but receiving almost nine times that same amount of students from overseas. In the Netherlands English is widely spoken there, a fact that attracts a high number of foreign students there too.

Of course, since ERASMUS students benefit from scholarships, the above included numbers do not include the fee-paying students segment that move across European borders, a segment that is particularly important for management education in particular.

However, what other conclusions would you derive from the tables?

Jose Mario Alvarez de Novales: In Memoriam

With sorrow and pain I tell you that Professor Jose Mario Alvarez de Novales passed away today. Probably some of the readers had the luck of meeting and getting to know him. He was Associate Director and professor of strategy at IE-Instituto de Empresa Business School. He was visiting professor at ESC (Toulouse, France), ECESI (Colombia) and member of the Board of Ecole de Management de Lyon (France). He was a regular auditor for EQUIS and AMBA and member of different academic associations and networks. He will be sadly missed.

A book of condolences has been made available and here is one of the last public interviews he made, in Spanish, while knowing what was in store for him.

UPDATE: A testimony in Spanish by a colleague of the high esteem he was held in.

UPDATE: Another testimony in Spanish by a colleague and some commentaries.

No simple solutions to questions about faculty

In his latest post, Dean Dinwoodie raised a key issue for business school’s deans and managers that I hope he will allow me to summarize in a single question: What should be the right blend of faculty at business schools? The natural answer, implicit in his post, is: “it depends on the nature of each business school, whether it is oriented towards undergraduate education or executive offerings or postgraduate education”. However, if we consider an institution that covers different segments and type of programmes, the mentioned answer actually begs its question.

I was invited to speak at a recent conference on the future of the MBA organised by Dean Roger Martin at his school, the Rotman School of Management, in Toronto. The conference was attended by illustrious academics that included Chris Argyris, Michael Jensen, Bill McKelvey, Henry Mintzberg, James O’Toole and Jeffrey Pfeffer. One of the most recurrent topics discussed at the conference was the ideal composition of the faculty of business schools. In his presentation, O’Toole described the two polar profiles of faculty members, the academics versus the practitioners, using examples from his university. At the end of his presentation he formulated the question: which of the two polar types of faculty does a business school need most? The quick answer from the audience was: “both!”. Initially I was not entirely convinced by this answer: I found it too almost too evident and I was looking for some magical solution, something more complex and elaborated. However I concluded that business school deans have, first to assimilate that there is no such thing as a “pure and ideal” model of faculty, even with Solomonic qualities. As dean Dinwoodie point out, isn’t management a question of balancing?

"We will always have Paris": The AACSB-EFMD Conference

The joint annual conference of AACSB and EFMD, organised by the two major worldwide management education networks every four years, will be taking place in Paris next week. The event will gather deans and representatives from business schools of all quarters and the organisers expect a record number of participants this year. The opening speaker on April 23rd will be the Prime Minister De Villepin, on one of his first public appearances after the troublesome days before Easter week, when his government removed the controversial “contrat première embauche” or private sector first-job contract for workers under 26s, known in the argot of the French as CPE.

In fact, the CPE episode along with the results of the latest general elections in Italy a week ago, have thrown some pessimism among Europhiles. For example, this week’s issue of The Economist has a cover story –in its European edition- with a very ironic title: “Another Great Week for Europe”. Indeed, the CPE episode has evidenced the resistance to change of the “status quo” of several very active social groups in France –including some reluctant associations of students. Some of the slogans shouted on the streets were reminiscent to those used during May 1968, including the popular ones “A bas le capitalism!” and “Aux barricades”, but Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the popular activist of 1968 declared to Paris Match magazine that “today’s protests are based on the defensive, the fear of insecurity and of change” (quote from The Economist, April, 1st 2006). The students rebellion spread around 184 universities but affected very little the major French “grandes écoles”, including ESSEC and HEC, two of the most influential business schools in the country that are also sponsoring the annual conference mentioned above.

Attendees to the Paris conference should not worry about the described episodes since everything has returned to normal, unfortunately for many French people and particularly for those students who will probably suffer from unemployment due to the retirement of CPE.

Let me also invite those of you who will be in Paris on Sunday to the session that under the name “Looking Ahead: Deans and the Media on the Future of Management Education in Europe” will take place at the Palais des Congrés de Paris (Room 243) on Sunday, April 23rd from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.. Dean Danos and I will be participating in this presentation. Another very interesting session of the conference will take place on Monday afternoon, when Della Bradshaw, co-author of this blog will join Dean Patrick Harker of the Wharton School at a panel on business schools’ rankings. This panel is a second public round between the two who had a very interesting exchange on the same topic in the pages of Financial Times two years ago. I wonder will their position at the panel on Monday be different to those expressed then.

Tags(clickable): Patrick Harker, EFMD, AACSB, CPE, Economist

Two Pressing Challenges for B-schools Deans (2)

How can b-school deans foster valuable research and open new avenues that help young scholars to diffuse their academic contributions? Dean Lapert raised in his latest post the issue that the number of scholars and the volume of potential contributions have grown considerably in the last years whereas the number of academic journals has remained almost steady. This creates, in his opinion, a bottleneck “and many articles never see the light of day, even though they may be of great scholarly, and even public, interest”. He suggests “that we work with organizations that represent faculty in the various management disciplines to make available the means that will enable young researchers (and even those who are not so young) to have their works published”. I volunteer to support his initiative.

However, I believe that the pressing challenge mentioned should be also faced from an broader perspective. The key question is how business schools could foster more effectively the creation and the diffusion of relevant management research. This, in turn, is related to two issues: (i) what is relevant management research or knowledge, and (ii) what should be considered as valuable channels of diffusion of this research. The problem in distinguishing between those two questions is that, conventionally, the quality of a given piece of research (issue # 1) is validated by its publication in some canonical vehicle of communication (issue #2). For example, the quality of an article is supported by its publication in a refereed journal. Is there some way to escape this conceptual trap or, to put it differently, this Catch 22 situation?

Tags(clickable): EQUIS, EFMD, Web2.0,

Two Pressing Challenges for B-school's Deans (1)

The latest posts of Dean Danos and Dean Lapert raise key challenges facing business school deans nowadays: first, the scarcity of good scholars, in the amplest meaning, i.e., academics that excel both in research and in teaching and second, the need to foster valuable research and to open new avenues that help young scholars to diffuse their academic contributions. I will deal with the first challenge here by suggesting some initiatives that may help to alleviate the problem of the scarcity of faculty and leave the second challenge for my next post.

I agree with Dean Danos when he states that business schools have historically competed to attract the best faculty and that this competition has increased recently due to the expansion of management education offerings across the board. My first proposal to face this problem is to broaden the concept of "best faculty". Would it be recommendable to search for new faculty beyond the areas where business schools have been fishing traditionally? Let me suggest some examples:

Tags(clickable): INCAE, Egade, Business School

A friendly way to keep updated on China

China is a pole of attraction and interest for the rest of the world and should be on the radar of managers and business students. May I suggest some friendly links to keep updated on Chinese affairs.

- In English: CCTV International (CCTV-9) is the English-language 24-hour news channel of China Central Television, China´s largest national TV network and is dedicated to reporting news and information to its global audience, with a special focus on China.

- En Español : CCTV.com Español

Doce horas al día durante los siete días de la semana, los programas en español ofrecen variados e interesantes programas incluyendo noticias, programas de temas especiales, de literatura y arte, de entrevistas y de enseñanza.

- En Français: CCTV.com en Français

L’émission de CCTV E&F est une chaîne internationale de la Télévision centrale de Chine (CCTV) destinée à un public d´expression française, et vous offre une fenêtre sur la Chine et un regard sur le monde.

- For Educators: China Education and Research Network.