Our former Dean, Dipak Jain, now Dean of Insead, suggests:
American schools are often “super-proud” of student bodies in which one-third are international, says Dr. Jain, who was dean at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University until 2009. In classes at Insead, he says merrily, “it looks like the United Nations.”…..Where M.B.A. students at Insead study businesses and business practices from around the world, American curriculums tend to be “very U.S.-centric,” he says, with case studies focused on domestic corporations. A more global outlook might in fact run counter to the fundamental appeal of American schools, he suggests. “The attraction for the U.S. is, people go there to work with the Americans,” he says. “So for U.S. schools, if they become completely international they would lose their competitive advantage.”
There is a difference between teaching international cases and having an international student body. While international students might want to learn about American business at an American business school, that does not mean they do not want to come here to get a degree (I hope!). Going global means staying local.
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
July 27, 2011 at 3:45 pm
rjd100
Europe is fragmented into small countries and the USA is not, so of course it appears more international. If the European Union were used as the standard of measurement, I wonder if European business schools are any less parochial than U.S. ones. Are there really more cases on Chinese, African, Latin American or Indian business in European business schools than in U.S. ones? I don’t know but my gut instinct would be to doubt it.
Using European Union countries as a measure of the international focus of a European business school is not that different from a U.S. business school saying it has cases from all 50 states. In either case, you are still playing to the local audience.