Free B-School? The Perk Is Flourishing in Asia and Europe

Attending B-school for free seems unheard of as the price tag of MBA degrees continues to rise: A year at Wharton’s or Stanford’s business school will set you back $115,000. But many employees of international corporations do just that. Company-sponsored programs make degrees from top schools in Europe, and more recently Asia, much more accessible.It’s not just students that benefit. Schools gain a steady stream of prospects with business experience. And sponsoring companies incentivize top talent to work with them longer than they ordinarily might; they also gain recruiting access to soon-to-be B-school graduates.“If we have a good relationship with a company, it helps with their recruiting other students,” says David Simpson, admissions director for MBA and graduate finance degrees at the London Business School, ranked No. 3 in Europe in Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2019-20 MBA rankings. A quarter of LBS’s full-time MBA students are sponsored, as are 30% to 40% of part-time executive MBA enrollees and 25% to 30% of students in the school’s master of finance program. The school maintains a full-time business development manager who handles existing corporate relationships and is focused on adding more sponsors to the current roster..Simpson and his staff travel worldwide annually, from Mexico to Japan, to discuss specific company offices’ needs and meet with potential applicants. The itineraries change year to year, depending on where the focus is.Companies that have consistently sponsored LBS students over the years include Bain & Co., Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., Itau Unibanco Banco Holding SA, McKinsey & Co., Mitsubishi Motors Corp., Nomura Holdings Inc., Norges Bank, and Samsung Group. Saudi Aramco is a frequent sponsor.They do not visit every sponsoring company. “It might not necessarily be a relationship that we built—it’s more on their side, or might be informal,” says Simpson. Also, he says, some larger family businesses have supported students, notably several from India.Companies most keen on sponsorship are those whose employees often stay for many years and might not otherwise gain exposure to global banking. “These are super big companies, so they need highly skilled workers who understand the way the world does business and have global networks as well,” says Simpson. More than half of his students from South Korea, and at least 75% from Japan, are fully sponsored. (Most U.S. product and services companies stopped sponsoring employee MBAs a decade ago.)Asian B-schools are increasingly popular because of their lower costs and focus on the Asian economy. Enrolling in the full-time MBA program at the Asia School of Business costs 60% of what tuition at a top U.S. program would be, including housing. Among the most prestigious schools in Asia are China Europe International Business School, first in Asia in Bloomberg Businessweek’s ranking, University of Hong Kong’s business school at No. 2, and third-ranked National University of Singapore. CEIBS and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology are less than 30 years old.“A big part of us taking off was corporations saying, ‘We’ll commit to sending a handful of students,’” says Sean Ferguson, associate dean of the four-year-old Asia School of Business. “A lot of it is cold calling, or business development.” His colleagues have canvassed Southeast Asia, including Myanmar, the Maldives, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong. They recently returned from Kazakhstan.Business programs are increasingly shaped by input from sponsoring companies. “We’ve had a dialogue, a lot of which starts off with companies on our board,” says Ferguson. “They’re our first go-to for, ‘Hey, we’e thinking of starting xyz.’ It’s really figuring out what our corporate partners want.” Not surprisingly, board members and corporate partners don’t like losing top employees to a two-year MBA program, so this fall ASB launched a part-time MBA for working professionals. Students travel to Malaysia to attend classes every six weeks for nine days (through two weekends). Ferguson says almost 80% of the part-time students are sponsored, vs. 5%-10% of full-time MBA students.Similarly, a handful of the school’s board members come from central or regional development banks and have expressed interest in sending students. Wasting no time, ASB is developing a master’s degree in central banking, Ferguson knows he has a lot of traveling ahead. “One of the challenges is that organizations are like, ‘Lets try this out,’ so they’ll send people, and then want to see how it pays off, so there’s a pause,” he says. Which means no pause for Ferguson..To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dimitra Kessenides at dkessenides1@bloomberg.net.©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Free B-School? The Perk Is Flourishing in Asia and Europe

Asian B-schools are increasingly popular because of their lower costs and focus on the Asian economy.

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