Tomorrow’s leaders are polishing their skills at the Dubai campus of S P Jain School of Global Management, which has just been ranked 19th on the Forbes list of the best business schools outside of the United States.
S P Jain, based in International Academic City, even outranked the prestigious HEC in Paris, which came in 20th. Topping this year’s list is Lausanne, Switzerland’s International Institute for Management Development.
“Being on this list is thrilling as not only are we clubbed with the world’s best schools, we have been ranked ahead of schools we truly admire,” said Nitish Jain, the president of S P Jain.
“S P Jain is an innovative school that is focused on creating highly trained, globally intelligent graduates for leading companies.”
Officials at HEC Paris were magnanimous at having been surpassed by S P Jain.
“First, congratulations to S P Jain,” said the HEC spokeswoman Delphine Wharmby. “We are not surprised by newcomers in the rankings. As you know, the business of business education has become truly global, and the competition comes from all places in the world, which is a good thing.”
The Forbes rankings this year compared the earnings of the Class of 2008 in their first five years out of the business school. After subtracting tuition and forgone income, S P Jain’s Class of 2008 enjoyed a five-year salary gain of US$63,900 – from a pre-MBA salary of $9,000 to $47,000 (in 2012). In addition to this, S P Jain’s MBA Class of April 2013 benefited from a threefold increase in salaries from $9,650 (pre-MBA) to $30,500, on completion of the MBA programme.
The Forbes survey is based on feedback from ex-alumni and the return on investment from MBA programmes.
“The ranking of business schools is based solely on the return on investment achieved by the graduates from the class of 2008,” said senior editor Kurt Badenhausen on the Forbes website.
Mr Badenhausen said: “We surveyed 17,000 alumni at 100 schools regarding their pre and post-MBA compensation, career choice and location.
“We heard back from 27 per cent of those graduates. Schools where we did not hear back from at least 15 per cent of their alumni were not included in the rankings. We also did not include schools where alumni had a negative ROI [return on investment] after five years.”
The S P Jain campus in Dubai – the school also has sites in Singapore and Sydney –has been open for 10 years, with 2,500 students participating in one and two-year programmes. It now boasts a host of financial services and logistics companies queueing to employ its students.
“ The companies give us an idea of who they are looking for and then give us the job description and ask if we have the appropriate candidates” says Arindam Banerjee, an assistant professor of finance at the school. “Our students are not allowed to talk to corporates on their own, the companies are approached by our corporate relations team and it liaises with the HR and learning and development.
“We don’t want to get the wrong person in the wrong job, we know our students. There must be 20 business schools here so it is important to place the correct person in the correct place.”
ascott@thenational.ae