China, India and parts of Africa have a growing appetite for getting a business education in countries with established institutions and, for many western business schools, internationalisation is a big trend. In this Q&A, the education editor of the Financial Times, Andrew Jack, shared some of his insights on the state of business education with LSE Business Review’s managing editor, Helena Vieira. Despite a backlash developed in the US, he says that businesses will continue pursuing diversity. 

You have been covering the world of business education for some years now. Can you give me an idea of what has changed or is changing?

There’s an increased focus on climate change, sustainability and business purpose, alongside profits. That’s clearly an area of growing demand by students, to some degree by faculty and employers as well. One big transformation overall in the sector has been the evolution of teaching cases, research areas, institutes, endowed professorships, electives, or even core parts of the curriculum that focus on those issues.

Another trend is big evolutions in international cohorts,:who’s studying, where they are coming, in institutions in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia, in particular. A big proportion of demand comes particularly from China, and now increasingly India and Africa: a lot of the faster growing and middle-income countries with an appetite to come to established education institutions. We see increasing partnerships in those parts of the world and the strengthening of local and regional institutions in China, a lot across Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, the Middle East and so on.

There are shifts in demand, the types of students, the subject areas, and then, thinking about formats, in the evolution of specialist training and qualifications, focused on digital skills, AI, analytics, sustainability. Those are some of the areas where you’re seeing more specialist degrees or interdisciplinary subjects. New formats of teaching were massively accelerated by COVID. We’ve seen a lot more embracing of hybrid and online learning alongside the more traditional in-person campus experiences. You see that also in executive education or lifelong learning, as well as in the evolutions of the more traditional MBAs.

Do you notice differences in what is taught in the US and the UK? How do you compare both countries in business education?

Both countries, particularly the US, have huge variety, but I would point to more similarities than differences. They’re all embracing a lot of those trends that I mentioned around specialisms, teaching formats and so on. Historically, of course, the US was the home of the MBA, particularly the classic two-year on-campus MBA. Europe, which came a little bit later to the party, has more focus on one-year master’s in management degrees, which are a European creation. But we now see a convergence: a move in the US towards one-year masters’ qualifications and, in Europe, more evolution and fragmentation of some of those degrees.

It’s obviously a huge and varied market and you really can’t talk about a single US approach. You’ve got the big schools on the coasts, particularly in Boston, New York and San Francisco, that cater to a global group of students and career aspirations. You’ve got many more schools, such as in the Midwest, that might focus more on local demand, regional labour markets, the students coming in from their own region with different career outcomes and aspirations. Some schools will have certain expertise, let’s say, around engineering, science, finance and sustainability. I suppose the other big distinction is that the scale of zeros is always bigger in the US. Most US schools have much bigger resources, whether in terms of endowments or tuition revenues and post-graduation starting salaries than in Europe or Asia. That creates more resources to develop new initiatives, to do more academic research and publications from business schools than in Europe.

LSE doesn’t have a business school. It has a department of management that offers an MSc focusing on the academic aspect. Where does this model fit in what you described?

We do cover a full range of approaches; we’re not limited to MBAs. In terms of our reporting and editorial coverage, we will talk about initiatives, research, teaching trends in many places, including LSE, which has certainly featured in our coverage overall (and through its joint EMBA and MiM in our rankings in the past).

One of the things with rankings is that we need a certain common denominator. You need a critical mass of schools and programs that are similar enough that you can then compare and contrast them. MBAs, masters in management in particular, are obviously very widely provided and clearly in high demand for students who want to pursue careers in management or business. There’s a certain commonality between those courses, but there’s always debate about the precise title of the qualification, the entry requirements and the nature of the course content. We have always used as a point of entry institutions and courses that are accredited by the big accreditation bodies, AACSB and Equis, to ensure quality control and standardisation. To look at schools and courses that have one of those accreditations provides us a benchmark.

You mention responsible business, but the zeitgeist seems to be changing, at least in the US. With the end of affirmative action, with the ouster of the president of Harvard and other universities, diversity seems to be on the way out. And ESG is being dropped out of companies’ mission statements. Are we reinstating the belief that the ultimate goal of a business is to improve profitability for its shareholders?

I think there’s a lot of nuance. There’s a lot of debate now in the US, focused on a few politicians, states and universities around issues like diversity or sustainability. But I wouldn’t say that means those priorities are by any means dead. Remember we’re in a very intense political cycle now. And some political groups or individuals certainly focus a lot on those issues. But diversity is a huge issue in the US. It’s not dead by any means. Businesses and other employers continue to focus on the importance of diversity for economic reasons as well as for social and policy ones, for mobility and justice. Yes, there has been a Supreme court judgment that was specifically focused on undergraduate recruitment to universities but is clearly having ripple effects elsewhere, particularly at the undergraduate level.

It doesn’t mean that they’re all going to stop thinking about or trying to find ways to encourage diversity. And that could be socioeconomic or in many other forms, as well as by race or ethnicity or national origin. For sustainability, it’s the same thing. Some states have pushed back against ESG and there are legitimate debates around the goods and bads, all the flaws and the limitations in ESG as a concept, the nature of rating agencies, and so on. But I would say there’s considerable continued engagement, investment and interest in responsible business practices of all sorts: climate change, sustainability, governance issues, human rights, social justice, labour supply chains, and so on. When you break them down into individual topics and themes, these are practical, tangible business risks and opportunities. There’s still an awful lot of interest and engagement around them in the US. There’s more controversy and criticism and polemic now. There is a bit of relabelling, renuancing, recalibration and adjustment. But they’re not by any means dead. For example, in diversity, there are mandatory requirements to disclose ethnic breakdown in employment in the US. There are countries in Europe where legally it’s not even possible. You can only focus on current nationality, and you can’t legally track or request information on a student or a faculty’s country of birth, for example. So, it’s a very nuanced picture across Europe as well as the US.

How is the MBA situation in Europe, is there a best one? What are the business school trends there?

I think we have got to be careful with our terminology. I don’t like to talk about what is objectively the best overall. Anybody looking at a business school or higher education institution will have their own needs, priorities, interests: they’re interested in a course of a certain duration, or in a physical location, or a certain specialism, the price point, the career trajectories of those who have gone there, etc

There are so many factors. What we’re interested in is providing a wide range of data points and encouraging students or others who use the rankings to explore, focus and model based on what their needs are. We attach certain weightings and provide an aggregated high-level view of what we consider the things that matter most. That’s partly based on feedback from schools, employers and particularly students, about what matters to them in their choice.

Our European ranking is a ranking of rankings. To try and build a holistic picture, we look at how the schools in our different individual rankings have performed – the MBA, EMBA, masters in management, and so on – and then we apply weights to the relative rankings of each of those scores individually.

You can see the ranking from not only last year, but many previous years. The ones that come out on top, most recently, include Insead in Paris, London Business School, IESE in Spain, ESCP in France, Bocconi in Italy. You’ll see a lot of schools will recur year by year in those leading positions. The European ranking overall fluctuates over time. It provides a distilled high-level view, but I wouldn’t objectively say there is one top school across Europe that delivers everything.

There are some schools that will provide an MBA, but not offer executive education or focus on executive MBAs. You really must drill down to get the picture. What the European ranking tries to do is at least identify some big, broad trends from the schools that are trying to span the whole sector and perform well in the different offerings.

All our methodologies are transparent and available on the website. The individual weightings vary a little bit, depending on which qualification we’re looking at. But the key weights that we consider (and the feedback we get suggests are important) focus on outcomes. That includes, of course, alumni salaries three years out, increases in salary and job position. It’s an attempt to try and measure the value added of the university course based on the return that graduates can achieve. We look at the diversity of employment sectors that students come from because we think that mix in the classroom is valuable. We have a value-for-money indicator, which is partly a proxy for social mobility. In post-professional courses, if you take into account salary before, salary after graduating, the net costs of salary sacrificed while you study, plus the tuition costs, and so on, net of scholarships and financial aid, that gives you a proxy for what the cost and return could be.

We look at some issues around purpose or responsible business. We’ve now got a measure looking at the operations of business schools in terms of publicly disclosed carbon audits and net-zero targets for their campuses. That’s how we measure whether faculty and leadership are trying to walk the talk around climate. We look at the nature of the ESG teaching within the curricula. We look at the international diversity and the gender mix of students and faculty and advisory boards of the institutions. And then we have our research rank, which tries to measure the quality of academic output (or knowledge production, if you like) by looking at the volume of faculty members’ publications in leading academic journals. So there’s a whole series of measures of the quality, content and outcomes for students that we take into account.

• The FT will be hosting the free digital conference Future of Business Education: Spotlight on MBA on Wednesday, 21 February. See the FT’s business school rankings for 2024.
  • The interview represents the views of the interviewee, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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