Economy

Getting schooled in big business

By Andrew Moody (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-16 09:57

There is certainly value for those attending business schools in Hong Kong and the mainland.

Graduates of the Hong Kong UST Business School, ranked 9th in the world in the 2010 Financial Times listing of top business schools, managed to increase their salaries by 31 percent after three years and had a 91 percent chance of employment after three months.

Similarly, graduates of CEIBS in Shanghai, ranked 22nd, increased their salaries by 33 percent after three years and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, ranked 28th, by 27 percent.

But what of the syllabuses? Are there differences in the way that MBA degrees are taught in China compared with the West?

Jiang Li is associate professor at the School of Accounting and Finance at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Originally from Beijing he has experience of teaching in not only Hong Kong but at York University in Toronto, Canada, and in the Chinese mainland.

"Unlike in the US and the UK, our courses reflect the fact there are many family businesses in Asia and so there are often conflicts between family members who are shareholders in the business. We actually deviate from the standard American textbooks on these issues," he said.

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Jiang said business education in China can be much more rigid with lecturers having much less freedom to deviate from the syllabuses than those at Western universities have.

"Here you are supposed to post your PowerPoint notes a week prior to your lecture. Everything is very structured," he said.

"In Canada, the professor will just walk into the lecture hall and start talking. When I was teaching investment and financial management I would just start talking about current events in the newspapers that might be relevant to the subject," he said.

"If I did that in Hong Kong the students would complain all the way to the head of the school."