are not excellent business schools: they may in fact
be well worth it on an ROI basis. Past that I think
the correlation gets very noisy and it becomes very
difficult to find any solid evidence to show that one
qualification is worth more than another.
The Global Economic Crisis
Should business schools take any
responsibility for the economic crisis? I
think that they have to take some responsibility.
However, what we have seen is a system crisis,
and business schools are simply embedded in that
system. As part of that system, are business schools
solely responsible? Absolutely not. Are they mostly
responsible? I don’t think so. Are they perhaps
part of the system that ought to be tweaked? The
answer to that is probably yes.
The system failure was a combination of inap-
propriate monetary policy, inappropriate regu-
managing money, or managing in an environ-
Value for Money and Return on Investment
latory regimes and the intense pressure that
ment of professional peers (law, medicine). financial institutions were under to offer un-
This definition issue is not new. In fact it has in terms of pricing, your mBA programs are realistic rates of return; but that pressure came
been ongoing for several years. I remember very competitive. how you do maintain quality, from a lot of institutional investors, some of
some 15 years ago there were disputes as to in terms of faculty, delivery methods etc. given whom were public sector pension plans, even
whether to admit someone from Oxford with that your tuition fees are considerably lower governments. Some of the people who are now
a PhD in medical genetics with no manage- when compared to other business schools, criticizing that system were part of it.
rial experience but who had worked for the both domestically and internationally? Our
World Health Organization (WHO) as a strategy has always been, for a variety of historical Now business schools did fit into that. If an ac-
consultant. In the end we accepted her. Today, reasons, to maintain an accessible price structure cusation could be leveled at business schools as
she is the WHO adviser to China on their whilst maintaining quality. It’s not always easy to a whole it is that we may have been training
anti-smoking policy. continue to offer a high quality program when people with a little too much arrogance. Both
the price structure is as competitive as ours is. the students and the faculty may not have been
Our EMBA is actually 42 years old. It’s the However, we have managed to do just that, partly as sharply critical of those trends as perhaps
oldest in Canada, in fact, one of the first in because of our location. they should have been.
North America. It actually predated the busi-
ness school. The business program was origi- People like to live here. Students like to come here In so far as concerns SFU, I can tell you that
nally part of the faculty of arts and socials to study. Consequently, we are able to attract high when all of this started to break I polled my fac-
sciences, housed in a department named the quality staff and faculty without having to pay ex- ulty, in particular my finance faculty, and asked
Department of Economics and Commerce; orbitant amounts of money. As such, we have been them what they had been doing in respect of the
it was here that the EMBA was started. The able to create and maintain a continually reinvigo- aforementioned over the last few years. I was in-
business school did not separate for another rated culture, dedicated to offering service quality undated with both academic articles and articles
10/15 years. to our students. written for less academic audiences, course out-
lines, lecture notes, all of which indicated that
Is the bar set higher? We benchmark our EM- I can assure you that we work very hard to en- our faculty at least - I cannot speak for others
BAs against all EMBAs and our calculable sure that this concept of quality pervades the – had been noting some of the problems in a
numbers are average or better. For example, entire organization. This is most evident in the variety of courses.
the student age is 38, but the average GMAT faculty we’ve been able to employ, gathering
is actually somewhat higher than average, in together a set of faculty members whose quali- However, I don’t think we are unusual. Academics
the 630/640 range. So whilst on the face of it, fications are quite remarkable. tend to be critical, and I find difficulty in believing
in a measurement context, our EMBA looks that most of the academics that I know, not only at
like any other EMBA out there, it’s not exactly Does the amount one spends on an mBA this university but at others, would not have been
similar to others. For various reasons we have determine the quality of the qualification? I critical of some of the things that were happening.
chosen to maintain relatively lower prices and think the correlation is very weak. I cannot and I also find it hard to imagine that a student would
as a consequence, we attract a pretty diverse would not pretend to deny that the top 20 schools have gone through our programs without hear-
group into our EMBA. in the world that charge huge amounts of money ing from someone at some point some strongly
52 | CEO
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