Twenty years ago management education was a pipe dream for most Chinese managers, but today China is the hottest place to study for an executive MBA. With five of the top 10 programmes in the 2012 FT executive MBA ranking taught there, China dominates this degree sector.
Ninety per cent of MBA students in China choose to study on part-time and executive programmes, making the executive MBA in China “very special”, says Qian Yingyi, dean of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua, arguably China’s most prestigious university. “The Chinese business school programme that is world class is the executive MBA,” says Qian. “This is the Chinese contribution to the world in business education.”
One reason for this dominance is that today’s corporate leaders in China were educated before business education became fashionable. “Most of them did not go to business school in their 20s to do an MBA,” says Qian. He believes there are two further reasons for the executive MBA’s popularity. “The Chinese love degrees – it’s a very Chinese phenomenon. And the club effect in China is much stronger than even at MIT or Harvard.”