MBA by mail!!! Who is better??

The regular ranking of MBAs take a lot of additional items into account  like salary benefit, connections, reputation of institution which are not really relevant to the course content offered.  But this year Economist did a ranking on the distance learning MBAs. Ranking in this group of MBA actually is very special. Here all the fringe elements don´t matter. Such MBAs hardly assist in job switch or salary rise . So the rating brings out the pure academic content. A person who is working and spends a part of free time , not expecting any gain in salary or position is going to be more truthful. He would be a better judge on the relevancy of the training he receives. Well, the ranking of these distance education MBAs  can be seen here http://mba.eiu.com/index.asp?layout=view_article&eiu_article_id=1782965163 .(I am not sure everybodycan see as the site requires registration). 5 British universities are on the top while US has 2 including the top one . France, Spain and Australia have one each.

Why would British Universities crowd this group while the US ones could only manage 2.  I guess the British universities cater to a lot of European managers who are working and don´t find enough in incentive to take a break from the job to do such courses.

Poor English – One Reasons for lack-lustre performance in Academic Research in Non-English Europe

In an article in VOX, Luc Bauwens,Giordano Mion, Jacques-Francois Thisse show that apart from low research budget and poor governance of academic institutions, lack of  proficiency in English is also important factor for the poor performance of European academic research. http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/834. They explain this citing example of the better performance in the European countries where English proficiency is high like Sweden, Netherland and Denmark compared to countries where it is low like Germany, France and Italy. It even goes on to point out that the former English countries like Australia,Canada,New Zealand, Singapore,Israel Ireland etc. performed much higher when measured in terms of Highly Cited Research (HCR) counts per million. Of course this study is based more on the Thomson Database only. But seems the researchers are quite right in their assumptions.

As usual there is no mention about Indian  or Chinese research capabilities. But a look at the site based on which the data is derived shows India has only 9 HCRs while Chinese have around 19 HCRs of which most of them are from Hong Kong (another former English Colony).

For the Education Departments in European countries this should be another wakeup call to be proactive. They are already under pressure to increase the emphasis on English because of the dilution of the other languages after the expansion of EU.

Overwork-Japanese Culture of Hardwork

Registered users of  The Economist can read this article about overworking in Japan http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10329261.  This highlights the issues of KAROSHI (the Japanese have a way of glorifying everything with terms) where somebody dies out of overwork. The article picks up an example of a third generation employee of Toyota who worked 80 hrs more unpaid overtime for the last six months apart from the normal working hours. Japanese are slightly less than Americans on their working hours. (1780 hrs compared to 1800 hrs per year). In Germany this is 1440 hrs.   Family members affected by Karoshi are payed compensations by the company.  In fact the widow of this person mentioned commented that Toyota´s dominance is more due to such flexible manpower rather than often quoted efficiency of working. Given the cultural loyalty and the hardworking habits of Japanese I tend to agree with her. The issue of of Karoshi is so pressing that there is even a website for it http://karoshi.jp/english/index.html.

Comparing this with the living conditions in Europe where total working hours are so low and then people are forced to take vacations just to get rid of the accumulated extra hours and days of holidays. Many of them argue that the efficiency of work is not good enough when higher hours are spent. Comparing it with countries like India and China it might be so. But Japan and South Korea have been consistently doing better than the Europeans in all aspects like education, health care etc. This shows that Europe cannot just keep watching. Either they have to work hard or increase efficiency to stay alive with their current conditions. But when I see that we will have public transport strikes in the next few weeks., it appears that the urgency for such changes is not yet being felt by the Europeans

No of working hours for US and Europe.

About general discussion on how the numbers of hours put in by workeres influences the overall GDP, here is a policy paper published by cepr http://www.cepr.org/pubs/PolicyInsights/PolicyInsight12.pdf.  The general conclusion  is  that ” GDP per capita is today 30% higher in the US than in France or Germany, while GDP per hour worked is roughly equal. This means that Americans are today richer than Europeans simply because they work more, not because they are more productive “.  But then as mentioned in earlier posts the hours spent by Europeans at other activities like building and fixing their own houses (however inefficient) does not reflect in the GDP as this does not get accounted. This isvery much identical to the black economy which also does not reflect in GDP. 

MBA, Management Studies Ranking – FT

Financial Times has published its annual ranking of management institutions and degrees http://www.ft.com/businesseducation/mba . USA dominates in all section lesser though for customised executive education (for most US executives easily take sabbatical to take the course they want full time). Other than UK ,European Management courses  fall pretty short of expectations. UK of course follows the anglo-saxon corporate management which gives a lot more importance to management and so valuation of these courses are higher. But this shows that the European corporate closed style is not going to change drastically in the near future. The politicians demand for salary caps is going to make things worse and   I guess they will be succcessful in implementing the caps in Germany. So I don´t expect any big change in the ranking in few years to come.

But the usual story Indian IIMs find no place even where South African and Nigeran business schools can find one. 

Influence of Parent is greater than teacher on performance ?- PISA Study

The latest PISA 2006 has now been made public. The exhaustive amount data which is available by this study and from the Education at a Glance Study 2007 together should be help making correlations between data sets. One of the relationship which struck me was that the students from the top nation spent a lot less hours with the teachers. For example countries like Finland , Japan, Korea rank higher in the survey. But the teaching total hours were lesser than the OECD average, while longer hours does not seem to help students go up in the scale. This is particularly true for US where teachers spend the higher number of hours teaching (though they get paid lesser than atleast Germany,Swiss,Luxemberg,Denmark (on PPP basis). Looking outside these 2 survey, generally it is accepted the working hours are longer among countries like US, Uk in comparison to Finland, Germany, Sweden. This could mean that the parents and children have more time with each other.  Also what can be seen is that the influence of parents education on the performance of students is higher in these countries. So maybe that even though productivity takes  hit with lower work hours, it probably contributes to better education standards.

This is just a surmise based on a glance at the data available. Probably a detail look into the data would give a better view on this issue.  

   

When will European Varsities Wakeup?

For the last  4 years,  IIE (Institute of International Education) has been indicating the drop in international student enrollment. But this year their annual report is out it indicates an increase in the international students http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=113743. This means that the drop attributed due to the excessive anti terrorist scrutiny is more or less getting overcome and the confidence and the lure of better education is bringing them back to US. But this also means the efforts made in the last few years by European Universities in compete with the US is not bearing fruits.  A study carried out by Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) for the  European Commission to identify the “brand value ” of European Varsities identified that most students weighed  US universities high on innovation, dynamism while the opposite for European Varsities http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/mundus/acasummary.pdf . But nothing seems to have been done about this. Even the Bologna Process http://www.eua.be/index.php?id=65 which is targeting for 2010 has not do anything about independence of universities, bringing out innovation or dynamism.

Reformation of Universities

One surprising fact I noticed in the Shanghai Ranking (refer to earlier blog) was that the poor performance of European universities. Mind you these were the universities which at the turn of the century contributed to growth of science and maths in all forms and definitely were the leaders.  But now US universities are dominating in all respects. 

Looking for clues and what is happening I got this link   http://www.bruegel.org/Public/Publication_detail.php?ID=1169&publicationID=4618.   I would recommend those interested to go through it as it is not highly theoretical and is in plain language. The summary is that European Universities are in need of nearly 1% of their education costs additional in higher educations. They also need badly better governance and reformation. Though the study on universities does not consider the independent research centres which are prime research centres in Germany and so skews the result, there is a need for funding and reformation in European universities.