and a variety of electronic aids to help job search. Each student obtains time or Executive mBA programme. With this in mind, can online
one year’s free membership of AMBA so they can immediately use their mBA programme providers really hope to compete in the same
facilities as part of their job search. In addition, we allow students to use space? One fundamental difference is that on-campus offers almost
part of our web site to profile themselves. immediate accessibility to staff to the students, which translates into im-
mediate interaction. Online may offer similar interaction, but oftentimes
The Green Movement it does not.
With respect to the recruitment landscape, sustainability repre- Here at Nottingham, we have made a decision not to offer online. Instead
sents one of the bright spots. With this in mind have you increased we are opting for a blended approach, as we feel the latter will be particu-
your efforts for green curricula? I think we define sustainability to be larly beneficial to our overseas campuses. Our aim is to ensure that the
a bit broader than green, but green issues certainly feature all over the Nottingham experience is consistent, and whilst I and my colleagues on
place. I’ll draw an example from material I teach: in capital budgeting the other campuses can ensure we are all looking at the same syllabus, we
I deal with the cleanup operation after an open cast mining operation. may not all deal with a topic in the same way. A student in China or Ma-
Here we have devastated the landscape to extract the raw material, and laysia is seeing different people and listening to different comments from
what often happens is that as part of the mining contract the operators the audience in the UK, so I am quite keen to build a component into our
take on the responsibility to make good the landscape which can result in modules, which can electronically link these experiences in some way.
additional responsibilities. They might have taken on, a commitment to
create a public amenity of some sort, and the question has to be whether Some say that online programmes are easier than campus-based
the mining organization should do it from their own resources or buy in programs. Do you concur with this? I think that an online MBA places
a specialist to do it for them. As another example the derivatives teaching a tremendous load on the student. I think he is very much in the position
will cover carbon trading. of someone reading a book, who is stymied when he reaches a page he
does not fully understand. The online student is potentially isolated. By
But as I said sustainability is broader. It is also about balancing the compet- contrast, the on-campus student has the luxury of following the teacher
ing demands of different groups in an organization. One of the interesting out of the lecture room to the coffee bar and requesting a further clarify-
debates which is ongoing in the business school is about the relative im- ing chat. However, online should not be discounted. For some people it’s
portance of the different groups of stakeholders. ‘Can an organization sus- going to be the only way they can acquire an education.
tain itself if it pays too much attention to one rather than the other?’ Sus-
tainability has an environmental dimension, certainly, but it also addresses return on Investment
the shareholder /stakeholder trade off, the direction setting element, and
the degree of commitment from an organisation’s participants. Does the amount one spends on an mBA determine the quality of
the qualification? I think not. One can spend a great deal of money and
is this being driven by those students for whom sustainability is get a poor MBA and one can spend less money and get a good MBA. A
more than just a buzzword? The short answer is no. In our case it is major determinant of the quality of the degree a student achieves is of
research driven. The University brought corporate social responsibility course, the amount of work that the student is prepared to do. The value of
into the business school, and when it was established as a research activ- an MBA to a student depends on the choice of programme, the quality of
ity, we started to teach it. Then we introduced a themed MBA around the faculty teaching the programme, and the effort the student puts in.
CSR, which attracts many enthusiastic students.
There are some schools which cost a lot more than we do, there are oth-
I expect more students to graduate with the CSR label than our admis- ers that seem to cost less. On balance the variation in price across the in-
sions statistics project. Our target for the MBA this year is somewhere stitutions that I look at in the UK as real competitors is not substantial.
around 70 fulltime students and we want to grow this number slowly
by about 5 per annum. Although this year we’ve had about 30% more Given the current state of the global job market, graduates are
applicants, we’ve kept our offers down. In general, I am looking at the finding it increasingly more difficult to simply walk into certain
following split: 75 % of applicants for the MBA general, with Entre- fields and/or jobs. Therefore, when considering Roi, should ap-
preneurship, CSR, and Finance together making up the other 25%. Of plicants be trying to identify business schools that are more keenly
those three, the largest programme is CSR. Over the year, the number priced? I have a pet phrase, which is appropriate here. “It’s not the
of people graduating from the general MBA will diminish with a shift letters MBA after your name that counts; it’s the name after the MBA
into the specialist programmes as people become more confident and - MBA Nottingham. As I mentioned earlier, that means an AMBA ac-
gain directional impetus. Not surprisingly, CSR attracts a lot of student credited programme, ranked in the FT and Economist top 100. This is
attention, but as yet, this is not reflected in the number actually special- what prospective employers look for first and foremost. Value for money
izing in the subject. is a ratio of output to input: one can obtain a very cheap MBA, but sadly,
the value for money is simply not there.
Online vs. Classroom learning
in terms of pricing, your mBA programmes are very competitive.
Classroom-based teaching facilitates interaction with classmates how you do maintain quality, in terms of faculty, delivery meth-
and professors and provides students with significant networking ods etc. given that your tuition fees are considerably lower when
opportunities, clearly big selling points when considering a full- compared to other business schools, both domestically and inter-
46 | CEO
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