I am baffled. Henley's MBA is on the Reading campus, and both locations are in Berkshire, one of the countries richest and fastest-growing countries. It's a famous business school in a dynamic environment.
Liverpool's management school is small and new, and is mostly known for franchising its online degrees to Laureate, a for-profit partner. Liverpool is a poor and struggling city with a proud past and a lot of potential. The university wrote this report about the Liverpool City Region (LCR):-
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/publicpolicypractice/State,of,City,2016,FINAL,LR.pdf Page iii of the summary reads accurately to me:
"Headline performance
The headlines on LCR’s performance are the following. There is a
wealth gap. The city region’s GVA per capita is around three quarters of the national figure and the second lowest figure of 11 second-tier city regions. There is a jobs gap – with low employment and high unemployment levels, especially for young people. There are a relatively low number of jobs in relation to its working age population – a low ‘jobs density’. There are high levels of long-term sickness. The city region has significantly higher than national proportions of workless households.
It is relatively low on higher level skills and has a high share of workers with no qualifications.
There is a productivity gap. Despite the recent growth in output, the level of economic inactivity contributes to a significant productivity gap in comparison with the national and other second-tier city regions in relation to population."
I can't imagine why anyone would pick Liverpool over Henley, unless they had specific ties to the city and were not able to take the short commute to better schools in Manchester and Lancaster.