Wall Street Journal_In Eastern Europe, Business Schools Bloom (November 9)
09.11.2007
By DEBORAH STEINBORN
SPECIAL TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 9, 2007
Innovative Programs
Gain Global Repute
And Foreign Students
When Iztok Seljak, a middle manager at Slovenian automotive supplier Hidria D.O.O., thought about going back to school to earn a master's of business administration, he didn't need to look far. Nearby was IEDC-Bled School of Management.
There were a lot of things he liked about the private school, but also some downsides: For one, back then, in 1995, the school wasn't even 10 years old. Mr. Seljak decided to attend anyway. His bet paid off: He has become vice president at Hidria. IEDC-Bled, meanwhile, has attained international repute. It has a diverse student body, is accredited by the Association of MBAs in the U.K., and is founder of the Central and Eastern European Management Development Association, a global management-development network.
IEDC is one of a small but growing number of business schools in Central and Eastern Europe making their mark on international management education, by drawing students from home and abroad with programs that are innovative, flexible and often affordable.
It isn't easy. Many business schools in the region still are haunted by their Communist past, and face limited pools of young applicants in their home countries, a dearth of trained faculty, resistance to high tuition fees and even state intervention in curriculum. But pioneering schools are striking a balance between local educational challenges, and the need for recognition farther afield.
"Today, the best schools in central and Eastern Europe attract students from all over the world," says Milenko Gudic, director of the International Management Teachers Academy, a training program co-sponsored by the Open Society Institute and Ceeman, the management-development network. "The irony is the best schools are sometimes forced to attract international students because of poor demographic trends in their own backyard."
In a country whose population totals two million, IEDC drew three-fourths of its student body from 57 countries other than Slovenia in 2005. Flexibility is key: Participants in its Presidents' M.B.A. program can enter the school at any time throughout the year, and have as long as three years to complete coursework.
Tuition fees, at €23,000, or about $33,660, for the one-year M.B.A. program, may be high for the region but are reasonable compared with Western European schools. IEDC is also known for integrating art, theater and music into its courses. "This approach is unusual, but we find it makes managers more creative and reflective," says Danica Purg, the school's dean.
Other business schools in the region also have carved out niches. The relatively small Estonian Business School Group in Tallinn -- counting 500 postgraduate alumni -- draws roughly one-fourth of masters-level students from countries as diverse as Argentina, Belgium, China, Russia and the U.S., EBS teaches in Russian, English and the local Estonian language, and brings in foreign faculty.
Estonia is founding home of Skype, an Internet-call business, and other information-technology businesses. The school's offerings reflect the local focus on IT, as well as trade throughout the region. It recently increased its emphasis on change management -- a structured approach to change in individuals, organizations and societies -- largely in response to feedback from students and partner companies, and as part of an effort to stand out.
"Very few schools in the region have fully faced up to the need to differentiate themselves," says Nicola Hijlkema, vice rector for international relations. "Some schools can't because they are still weighed down by state requirements and not able to adapt their curricula."
Kozminski Business School in Warsaw offers a cross-fertilization approach to business education. The 14-year-old private school has a law school within its walls, and students can gain a dual degree in management and law, sociology or even economic psychology.
"We are experimenting with a somewhat broader model of business school than practiced in the U.S. or Europe, but the experiment seems to be working," says Andrzej Kozminski, dean and one of the founders, a group of Polish academics with extensive international experience.
Kozminski offers five masters-level programs in English. Participants can earn double M.B.A. degrees from Kozminski and the U.K.'s University of Bradford. At roughly €6,000 a year, tuition fees are a bargain by most standards, and the school attracts more than 10% of its postgraduate student body from abroad. Kozminski was the first business school in Central and Eastern Europe to be accredited by Equis, the benchmark European Quality Improvement System.
To date, the only other business school in the region with the accreditation is the state-run University of Ljubljana's Faculty of Economics in Slovenia, though several other schools are in the process of applying, according to a spokesman for European Foundation for Management Development, the Equis-accreditation body.
Poland is "much farther along in the internationalization of its postgraduate programs," says Ulrich Hommel, associate director at the Equis accreditation body. "Other countries, like Russia and some of the Baltics, still face a lot of state regulation, a lack of faculty resources and other problems. Poland seems to have overcome these early on, partly due to strong ties to U.S. and other Western universities."
Russian business education "has a very long list of problems," Sergey Mordovin, rector of the International Management Institute of St. Petersburg, says. The institute, founded in 1989 as a joint venture between Milan's Bocconi and then-Leningrad State University, is one of just a handful of Russian institutions whose M.B.A. program hold accreditation from the Association of MBAs.
"There are so many state regulations here impeding the development of business education," Mr. Mordovin says. "Russia has so few management professors, maybe 50 who are really good in the whole country. ...We have no competition because the Russian market is empty of western business schools. We have very, very few cases on local companies that can be used in the classroom."
The school has tried to overcome these challenges in part through offerings that meet international standards. Customized M.B.A.s for companies such as Gazprom and United Technologies Corp. and open-enrollment courses, on subjects including general management and business English, round out offerings.
The school is working toward Equis accreditation. Obtaining international accreditation "is a very tough exercise. It requires time, money, experience and enough enrollment," Mr. Mordovin says. "But you learn so much about your school, so it's worth it -- if a school can actually afford it. Many still can't."
Write to Deborah Steinborn at wsje.weekend@wsj.com5
-URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119455846969887046.html
 
|
