The Association of Business Schools is a sector wide body representing 120 UK business schools and partners. We talked to Paul Marshall, Chief Executive, about the changing international market for business management courses.
The PIE: You were CEO of the 1994 Group of universities before taking over at ABS. How, did that shape your international outlook?
PM: I was the first Executive Director at the 1994 Group so I helped formalise operations there. I tried to understand what the big issues were for our universities and develop policy around those, and to work with partners and the media to try and put that across.
One of the things that I did a little bit of in that job was actually looking at international partnerships. Partly because the fact that from my point of view in terms of particular policy development, it seemed that a lot of the big issues that we were looking at in the UK were not like dissimilar to things or what happening in Australia or in the US.
“In the UK Business Studies took a long time to evolve, unlike in the US or France”
The PIE: Has that international view continued at the ABS?
PM: I moved to the Association of Business Schools in January and that was partly because I was interested in working for a sector wide body. We have around a 120 members at the moment, around a 110 business schools within the UK, a number now of corporate members. But we also have an international membership and that’s growing fast. But the issue is for us is that business schools are very much a global market. A lot of our students are international students coming into the UK, but also our faculty are very, very mobile and likely to work overseas at some point in their careers.
So for us as a representative body it’s very important that we can work together to understand what the international market is and what the big issues are internationally. We also need understand the choices that individuals are making, because when somebody’s choosing to study an MBA, they are not necessarily choosing between three universities all in the same city but three universities maybe in three different cities around the world.
The PIE: Which countries are you engaged with most?
PM: We have links with business school associations across Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Canada and the US. For the last five years, the ABS has run jointly with the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) a joint international deans programme where we have around 15 deans a year drawn from all around the world that come together and then go on a series of visits to different countries to visit business schools, understand what’s going on, understand what the challenges are in that country, and what the strategy is.
This programme this year visited Oslo, Montreal and Paris. Next year we will be taking the international dean to Turkey, Singapore and Germany.
“About one in three of all international students studying in the UK are studying business and management”
The PIE: Of your members, how many rely predominantly on the international market?
PM: About one in three of all international students studying in the UK are studying business and management which is a huge, huge percentage. And actually if you look the other way round, if there are half a million students studying UK degrees offshore, 350,000 of them are studying business management education, so again that’s a huge market for us.
The PIE: What do you see as key trends in student recruitment into UK business schools? Where they are coming from and how is it changing?
PM: The big market was obviously India, very much, and China. I think there are challenges at the moment which have been brought about by the government’s immigration policies. But this year, we’re seeing a diversity in terms of where international students are coming from, so a big drop off in interest from India for example.
The PIE: Do you think this is about the loss of post study work opportunities?[More>>]
PM: It’s a combination of things. There have been lots of stories in the press, such as with London Metropolitan University, about issues around the quality we are getting in the UK. We are not doing a particularly good job in terms of marketing jointly or being particularly strategic about our international market.
But we also have to recognise, particularly in business and management, that there is a very rapid growth in the development of good quality business schools, particularly in India and China.
“There is a very rapid growth in the development of good quality business schools, particularly in India and China”
The PIE: Are schools in these emerging markets climbing the rankings?
PM: Yes. If you look at the Financial Times’ MBA rankings, the UK is second only to the US with fourteen schools in the Top 100, three schools in the Top 50, and one, the London Business School, in the Top 10. But there are now five Chinese business schools in the top 100, including one in the top 10 and three in the top 50. There are now two Indian business schools in the Top 20. So this isn’t just about the UK’s attractiveness in terms of people coming here.
The PIE: What can the UK do to shore up its position?
PM: We have to respond by very actively thinking about what is it that we can offer which is unique or different. We may need to accept that in the long run we will have fewer international students coming to the UK for some of those big markets, but actually we need to be getting out into their markets – working in partnership with those schools, and maybe building on the research quality that we have. Good examples include the University of Nottingham, whose Business School is actually bigger at its China and in Malaysia campuses than it is in Nottingham.
So we’ve got is some really good examples now of business schools which are genuinely multinational and delivering quality teaching and research out in those markets. Those markets may even start to support our schools. There’s a lot of Chinese money going into developing the Australian business schools at the moment. If you go to the University of Technology Sydney, they are in the process of building an entirely new business school right in the central business district in Sydney, entirely funded by Chinese Alumni donations.
“Sometimes we in the UK don’t realise how strong our brand is overseas”
The PIE: Do you think the UK brand is strong overseas?
PM: In the UK Business Studies took a long time to evolve, unlike in the US or France, because it wasn’t seen as a real academic subject. Oxford and Cambridge have only had business schools for the last ten years. In fact, the best Business Schools in the UK are often standalone like the London Business School, and even those at some of the ‘new’ universities founded in the 1960s polytechnics have a stronger international profile than Russell Group universities.
Take the Lancaster Business School, which has its own operations out in Delhi, Lahore and Dubai. Many within the UK would not necessarily know these things were going on. Actually, David Cameron visited the Lancaster Business School in Lahore a few years ago. The Prime Minister’s team said afterwards how surprised they had been to have arrived in Lahore to find so many adverts for the school on the streets, on buses.
So sometimes we in the UK don’t realise how strong our brand is overseas in some of these markets. I think we have such a heritage of welcoming international students, many of whom have gone on to positions of power internationally, and it is these strong networks we must build on.
