I'd remove Imperial from your list. How about Kellogg-WHU? Maybe the monthly format of the LBS programme in Dubai might work for you?

Hi Duncan,

Thank you for your comment.

Kellog/WHU unfortunately does not have the best connection opportunities compared to London or Paris. In addition I have no real sense of the schoole names and the associated brand. I can see that Kellog has high ratings and are probable a strong name in northern America.

The Dubai stream though interesting for its modular stream, is unfortunatly too far away. The core campus should be some where in Europe.

Should I remove Imperial due to it's low ranking? I visted the school and the admissions office and the curriculum is very interesting as well as their entrepreneurial focus.

I think that i would not mind the extra commuting of LBS if the outcome of a diploma from LBS far outweighs that of the other Schools. Is LBS the best in Europe and the best known outside of Europe?

Imperial is no-where near as well known as LBS. In the FT ranking, Imperial is below Cass, Cranfield and RSM, and in terms of alumni recommendations doesn't even make it into the top 50. The quality of students will be no-where near LBS and, of course, the alumni network is much weaker and smaller. Imperial has a good reputation as an engineering and science school, especially in the Commonwealth countries, so if that was your career direction then it could be good. LBS is a huge school that's good at everything, including entrepreneurship. Just compare what LBS does http://www.london.edu/facultyandresearch/subjectareas/strategyandentrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.html with what Imperial does!

Hi,

Perhaps I needed to look at bit more detailed into LBS. Thanks for helping me out. This is by far the most hard decision I have ever made. The only issue that I have left with LBS is that it is bi-weekly.

I want to attend a top European School, which is high in value for money, good connections from Copenhagen, holds classes on weekends every other month, high in brand value.

Imperial came up as it had reasonable rankings outside FT, especially for Finance area.

I am bit reluctant on Cass and Cranfield, as I have not heard of these schools before. In the Nordics the known schools are LBS, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE and Henley.

PS: Is the FT rankings the most acknowledged of all rankings?

Yes, the FT is the most reliable ranking for people who already have some management experience. For more junior people, The Economist full-time rankings are useful because they focus on programmes with high percentage increases in salary; so schools that recruit more junior people, or more people from the developing world, do better in The Economist. However its EMBA ranking is a joke: they left out a whole series of schools including Wharton and LBS... most of the leading schools in fact.

Cranfield is a really excellent MBA. I would put the education experience there well above Oxford, Cambridge, Cass or Imperial. Cass is a very strong school for finance.

I agree that Cranfield is excellent (having completed an Exec MBA there myself). Two other benefits to consider are that the Exec programme is available in two modes of study - part-time (mainly Fri/Sat of alternate weekends) and modular (intensive sessions typically a little over a week long, every couple of months). The latter is preferred by many people who fly in from Europe or occasionally further afield to participate, which would give you a broadly Continental network. Plus it is close to three low-cost airports, Luton, Stansted and East Midlands.

Thank you

It is very difficult to asses these schools coming from outside of the UK. The school should be the one providing the best international prospects for me in the future.

What is it that will take Cranfield above Cass and Cass above Imperial, and LBS above Cranfield?

PS: I am very keen on getting your experiences from Cranfield. Any insights you have would be very appreciated.

I'm sure you will appreciate that nobody can give you an unbiased comparison between MBA programmes because participants' experiences are probably more valuable than statisticians' (especially since the things measured in the rankings are pretty poor proxies for course quality) and it would take a (wealthy) masochist to put themselves through more than one MBA course in a lifetime. So I can only tell you what I like about Cranfield, plus some observations about your alternatives based on desk research and attending open evenings.

There are three areas in which I think Cranfield successfully differentiates itself from other business schools:

1. Greater emphasis on the interpersonal side of business - how organisations and individuals (including ourselves) interact, and also what we want from our work lives. There's no point in being able to come up with a great strategy if you can't get people to buy into it, or in valuing a business well but being unable to buy it for your company because you're not a great negotiator; more important still, gaining an MBA qualification is a ticket to a wide range of career and life options; I think Cranfield does more to help students think about how best to use that privilege

2. A significant proportion of Cranfield faculty members have worked at a relatively high level in the business world, and still do consultancy projects for commercial clients. And the school provides a lot of customised executive education, much of it delivered on client premises, for a wide range of corporates and public bodies. So the lecturers have a much closer connection with real business contexts than those in some other establishments

3. The school's admissions policy favours older, more experienced students (especially on the Exec programme) and recruits them from a much wider range of backgrounds than most, if not all, business schools. There are some (LBS?) that seem to favour people from the City/investment banking and from the big accounting and consulting firms, while others seem to attract Indian IT guys. It's great to have some people from these backgrounds in a cohort, but when people of one profile start to crowd out others, the range of experiences and perspectives shared during lectures can be diminished.

Of the three points I've highlighted, the third is the one that made the biggest impact on me. The range of people on my course made for a unique experience - they ranged in age from late 20s to mid 50s, included people who left school at 16 and others who already had PhDs and Masters degrees, and featured a guy who taught special forces to resist torture techniques, serial entrepreneurs and a woman who ran a centre that helped young women who'd been abused.

Much of what you learn on whichever MBA programme you choose will not be about trade skills such as discounted cash flows, value stream maps, directional policy matrices and the like, but will be a combination of interpersonal and organisational stuff and the learned experiences in real business contexts gained by your peers and the lecturers. Using those criteria I think Cranfield is hard to beat. But, of course, I haven't studied at any other of the schools you mention, and people who've attended those might see the same strengths in those establishments as I do in Cranfield...

Finally, you said that the best international experience is important to you. Most good business schools attract students from many countries (which is a different matter than having a high proportion of overseas students, many of whom could all be from one country). I nearly went to LBS. Its intake probably includes people from as many countries as Cranfield's. However, I noticed that many of them seemed to work for investment banks or PWC. That doesn't represent diversity of experience to me.

I think mistermark will have to add his own comment, but I would say that what makes the Cranfield experience unusual is that you take the same MBA as the full-time students, and that equips students to grow their careers better. That's why Cranfield's better than most other schools in the FT EMBA ranking for 'aims achieved' and salary growth despite being only 63rd for work experience. So, certainly, it's recruiting students who are not so senior as most other schools and because of that the alumni don't get the same high salaries.

I think mistermark will have to add his own comment, but I would say that what makes the Cranfield experience unusual is that you take the same MBA as the full-time students, and that equips students to grow their careers better. That's why Cranfield's better than most other schools in the FT EMBA ranking for 'aims achieved' and salary growth despite being only 63rd for work experience. So, certainly, it's recruiting students who are not so senior as most other schools and because of that the alumni don't get the same high salaries.

I agree that Cranfield has historically been unusual in that Exec and full-time cohorts follow the same course. Recently however the latter has been reinvented to provide participants with a lot more real-world work experience - for instance, projects often involve working with real businesses. I'm not sure whether the Exec programme will go down this route, because participants already have jobs (and their employers might not want them providing 'free' consultancy for other firms...).

Cranfield MBA students, both full and part-time, tend to be a little older and more experienced than those at many business schools, so may have higher pre-MBA salaries. This can work against the school in some surveys, as they give a lot of weight to post-MBA salary uplift. This is exascerbated by the number of students who set up businesses or switch into lower-paid careers having recognised that they may be more fulfilled or better suited to such roles.

Thank you both for the valuable insight you have shared with me.

I am still in conflict around which school to attend and as I speak with admissions offices, read blogs or post in forums i scratch a bit more of the surface and see behind the rankings.

In regards to Cranfield; I have two road blocks with the Cranfield EMBA. Firstly, the distance from London. I would have to fly into either Gatwick or Stansted and have a long train ride into Campus. Second, the programme is either bi-weekly weekends or modular with up to 9 days in stretch every other month.

The Imperial and Cass format is the best of all the schools for commuters, as it offers the monthly weekend format.

Oxford also has above format, perhaps with more DL and is also within my reach.

I have decided to exclude LBS due to the bi-weekly format.

Guys,
I am also exploring options for EMBA in the UK starting next year (i.e Jan, Apr or Sep'14 intake). The options I considered intially were LBS, CASS, Cranfield, Imperial College, Oxford and Cambridge. But after going to the information session for LBS and open days for Cranfield, CASS and Imperial. I have decided against CASS and Imperial. So the new list I am considering now is
LBS
Oxford
Cambridge
Cranfield
Chicago Booth

LBS clearly confirmed that it needs a GMAT score of 600 mininum to consider an application. Cranfield has option to take its own test when either you have a less than 600 GMAT score or you have decided to not to take GMAT. On their website Oxford and Cambridge also briefly mention a score of 600 as a requirement.

Any insight on the GMAT score requirement for the EMBA program for above schools will be of great help to me.

The GMAT is much less important for the EMBA than for the MBA. Even LBS has some flexibility over GMAT for the EMBA for the sort of candidates which it would actively seek. 600 isn't a very hard score to get, and please don't focus on the schools' GMAT requirements as a variable in selecting them. These are very different programmes.

Thanks for the quick response Duncan.I am a native Indian and naturalised British citizen, currently living in the UK I may move to Dubai, Australia, Singapore or India in 5-7 years time. Hence I am looking for a globally recognised program. Talking to few of my contacts I got an impression that only LBS, Oxford and Cambridge are well recognised outside UK. So I want to know your view of the global recognition of the Cranfield and Chicago Booth programs.

I think the rankings show them fairly. The University of Chicago is known worldwide.