Business schools are a “force for good” and must take a more prominent role in shaping the future, says the regional head of an association for such schools.
“It’s time for business schools to take a much more active role in the business arena,” says Timothy Mescon, senior vice president and chief officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International).
The association is more than 100 years old. Today it has over 1,600 member schools – around 10 per cent of the world’s business schools, says Mr Mescon, who spoke at the Innovation Arabia conference in Dubai last month.
Some 786 are accredited by the AACSB, five of which are in the UAE – Abu Dhabi University, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates University, University of Dubai and Zayed University.
“The sands are shifting dramatically,” he says, “and the role of business schools today is to interface between the world of theories in universities and the world of practice outside.”
The world has become “global, complex, turbulent and dynamic”, Mr Mescon says, and he believes that business educators need to be “co-creators of knowledge” to navigate the changes. “We are not doing our jobs unless we connect theory with practice,” he adds.
“I believe both business schools and businesses are a force for good.”
Mr Mescon has himself worked as the head of a business school, having been dean of the Coles College of Business at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University in the United States for 18 years.
He went on to spend six years as the president of Columbus State University before moving across to AACSB and has been working in Amsterdam for the association for two years.
Schools, like the business world that they train people to go into, need to “embrace failure”, he says. “You can make mistakes but you must push forward.”
One way educators are doing this is by focusing more on innovation and entrepreneurship, in line with students’ changing needs. A quarter of those looking to start an MBA want to become an entrepreneur, according to the Graduation Management Admission Council, which surveys 10,000 prospective students annually. In the Middle East that figure rises to 28 per cent.
“Our alumni are constantly reinventing themselves,” Mr Mescon says. “We must incubate entrepreneurship and continue to foster innovation and creativity, and we must power business creation and economic development through entrepreneurship and management innovation.”
There are almost 14,000 searches for MBA courses in the UAE each month, says Kareem El Nagdy, chief operating officer at recruitment and courses site Laimoon.com.
More than half of those searches end up on Laimoon and the site receives an average of 800 inquiries a month about the MBAs it lists – a total of 100 MBA courses from some 60 universities and business schools.
The UAE has become one of the biggest markets for an MBA globally, says Mr El Nagdy, pointing to a 2013 study by Tecom and Deloitte of 2,400 students and 850 recent graduates in the Middle East and Asia. It found that the UAE was the fourth choice worldwide as a study destination after the US, UK and Canada.
“There was a huge hype for MBAs several years ago, especially here in the region,” he says. “But it can become about status more than an education. It has become a very saturated market.”
According to this year's annual MBA rankings from the Financial Times, the best MBA in the world comes from Insead, which has a UAE campus in Abu Dhabi. Alumni can expect to earn US$167,657 within three years of graduation, the FT claims.
London Business School is the only other one with a local campus in the top 10. It came sixth, with graduates hoping to earn $154,567 within three years. In the UAE, their courses would cost Dh302,667 and Dh368,044 respectively, according to Laimoon.
With so many business schools in the region and in the world, Mr Mescon says it is time for the institutions to become more active in the business arena so they can become “leaders on leadership” and ultimately “make an impact on the community”.
Harvard University, for instance, has been working on a $32 million initiative with Bloomberg Philanthropies (set up by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg) to provide customised education in public sector leadership and governance to city mayors worldwide to help them become “more effective, ethical, impactful leaders”.
The AACSB has a noble vision for business schools to become “enablers of global prosperity and encourage their students and alumni to “drive positive impact”, Mr Mescon says.
That fits neatly with one of the United Nations Development Programme’s core global goals for 2030: access to affordable, quality education, including university, for everyone in the world.
“None of this happens unless we, as business educators, are at the table and part of the discussion,” adds Mr Mescon. “It’s very important for us to move the needle, to make a difference.”
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