The “Financial Times” asks why French business schools rule the FT’s “Masters in Management” Ranking. After all, the current list is heavily dominated by the French Grandes Ecoles. 17 of the listed top 65 programmes are of French origin, and five rank in the top ten.
According to the business daily the reasons for such dominance lie in the French higher education system. Essentially, anyone who passes final exams at high school is entitled to a place at university. But those who want to study at the elite and often expensive grandes écoles have to conquer further hurdles in the form of two years of specialist training, followed by a competitive exam.
The French establishment invariably stems from these elitist schools and parents are willing to invest heavily to buy their offspring an education that will give them a leg up in the job market. But those grandes écoles teach only two subjects: engineering and business.
The situation in the UK is very different. There studying the timeless classics at Cambridge or Oxford gets you to the top and the view that management is not really a "proper" academic subject prevails, even amongst many corporate boards. Nevertheless British business schools do well in the FT ranking. Of the 65 schools ranked, 11 are British, and the UK is second only to France in the number of schools represented.
But why is that? Why are British schools doing fine even if management is considered a somewhat dubious academic issue? The answer is best exemplified by the London School of Economics and Political Science, ranked seventh in the world this year. 100 per cent of the students on its master programmes are from outside the UK. Unlike the grandes écoles, where French students dominate, Britain's best business schools are training overseas students. That's not all bad news for the UK since it shows the high regard in which a UK education is held worldwide.
http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/masters-in-management
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9c0fbd20-c0a7-11df-94f9-00144feab49a.html