The one-year Ashridge MBA costs £30000 – making it more expensive than Cranfield and only £12000 less
Posted in General on 05. Oct, 2010
The one-year Ashridge MBA costs £30,000 – making it more expensive than Cranfield and only £12,000 less than a two-year programme at London Business School. Customers build the brand.”The customers for the Ashridge MBA are a small but experienced group. So will the new chief executive try and speed up the process of receiving these powers from the UK government? “I’d like to see it happen, but it won’t make a difference to the Ashridge brand. I’m hoping I can encourage them to collaborate, and to get more recognition for what they are doing at the moment.”Ashridge has no powers to award its own degrees and the MBA – offered as a full or part-time programme and as a consortium MBA for a group of German companies – is awarded by City university. He is convinced, however, that it could do more to promote its research profile. “As I talk to people around the building it’s clear that we have some very interesting experts carrying out research into areas which haven’t had a lot of publicity.
And while Ashridge’s MBA programme is small, it attracts a steady stream of high flyers from a broad range of backgrounds.Professor Peters points to the school’s expertise in areas like virtual learning (there is a very well equipped resource centre which sells its services to clients), management consulting and to its research centre on business and society as evidence that Ashridge is at the cutting edge of management thinking. The list of corporate clients is impressive, from Deutsche Bank, to the BBC and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. There always has to be a balance between professional depth and academic depth.”It is over four decades since Ashridge transformed itself from the family home of the Duke of Bridgewater to a centre for management learning. “Our strength is always going to be our closeness to business. One academic with long experience of business school life says Ashridge has to decide how to sell itself in the future – as an academic institution or a centre for corporate education Its new CEO, however, doesn’t think the choice so stark. Competitors point out that the management school is heavily dependent on income from corporate education courses at a time when budgets have been tightening and business schools have been looking at ways of boosting their position in ranking tables through more prestigious research. Ashridge has a great reputation but it also needs to do more in the sales and marketing of itself.
I’m looking forward to waking what is a sleeping giant”.
Outsiders are certainly watching with interest to see how Ashridge’s new boss – thought to be the first dean to cross from continental Europe to a UK business school – shapes his domain. A former stately home on a 100-acre estate in Hertfordshire is a stark contrast to industrial Rotterdam, where he was dean of the School of Management for six years before accepting the Ashridge job. On his first day in the post he could be forgiven for looking forward to spotting deer and jogging round the grounds as much as to the serious business of running the organisation “It’s a beautiful place,” he admits “But it’s going to be a challenge for me here. Kai Peters is well aware that his new role as chief executive at Ashridge Management College comes with a few perks attached. “Or if evening students suddenly find that personal circumstances have changed, and they can’t fit in an evening course, we would see if they could do it during the day, or vice-versa,” she says.Both programmes are structured, says the university, so participants can study without major interruption to their work and careers..
One evening course student recently changed jobs and found her new employers more willing to give her time off during the day, and she switched to the executive course.Doreen Crawford, LUBS executive programmes manager, says that there is also flexibility within the courses if students find they wish to switch modules – if they find that one section of the other part-time programme contains something that they particularly want to study, for example. “By maintaining classroom contact time and networking opportunities students don’t miss out on crucial aspects of the MBA experience,” she says.This is also a popular programme with sponsoring organisations, as students can apply what they have learnt as soon as they return to the workplace.Leeds University Business School (LUBS) runs two part-time courses: an evening MBA and an executive MBA. It is also possible to transfer from a modular to an executive MBA if circumstances change – the executive course is a two-year part-time programme scheduled over 15 weekends a year.The average length of time to complete the modular MBA is three to four years. But here too, individuals can study at a pace that suits them. The minimum would be two years, by taking some modules “back to back” and preparing the project concurrently with other modules.The modular course has become increasingly popular as it allows students an alternative to traditional “distance learning” models, says Ruth Cooper, MBA admissions and marketing manager at Bath. These “rolling admissions” mean that students can apply up to six weeks before a module starts – quite a short period of time, if you need to make last-minute decisions.Each section of the course is paid for as it is taken.