Can Germany Overcome Barriers to Business School Greatness?

LEARNING ABOUT THE GERMAN WAY, IN ENGLISH

Angelika Werner. Courtesy photo

Angelika Werner. Courtesy photo

Frankfurt School’s MBA, an all-English program (though intensive German study is available and encouraged), benefits from proximity to corporate Germany, says Angelika Werner, head of corporate communications, in an email to Poets&Quants.

The school’s focus on “innovation, process management, and a long-term corporate strategy that emphasizes market share” — what Werner refers to as the “Teutonic approach to management” — is a departure from a “purely market-based as well as state-centric management approach” found elsewhere in Europe and in the U.S. And, she adds, “Where better to learn it than in Germany?”

“Through the Frankfurt School’s dedicated Career Services and their tailor-made support, all our students are excellently prepared to pursue successful careers,” Werner says. “…Our MBA is perfect for professionals from all over the world who want to give their careers a new direction, want to study German management practices, are keen on getting access to German or European companies and organizations, and even consider taking their next step with a German company.”

Frankfurt’s job placement rate for its one and only graduating cohort of 36 is around 89%, Steffens adds.

HISTORY IN THE MAKING? PRESIDENT STEFFENS THINKS SO 

But in examining the rankings dilemma of German B-schools, it is culture, and societal norms, that have presented the greatest difficulty, Steffens says. Germans have long believed that education should be free, and have neglected to place an importance on executive and professional education, he says. The roots of this view go back to the 1920s.

“Our business schools, as such, which were entitled to be trade schools — doing accounting and operation and things like that — they were considered as not scientific, so in the late 20s and the early 30s they were pushed into the comprehensive universities and lost their independence,” Steffens says. “This amalgamated structure meant that in Germany the universities felt themselves responsible only for bachelor’s and master’s and doctoral education, but not for executive education or professional education.

“This is complemented by a quite egalitarian approach to university education in Germany, where it was not very important if you have a master’s degree from Hamburg or from Berlin or from Frankfurt or from Munich, because the profile of the schools was more or less the same, so you got your degree, and then you wrote your resume and you were interviewed and you were employed or not.

“So this is now changing, it’s leveling off,” he says. “Within the public universities are faculties of business administration and economics — they are positioning themselves, they are outsourcing their graduate schools and calling them business schools. We have had that in Mannheim for at least 10 years now, but also the quite famous University of Cologne is now founding a new business school. So this is some, let’s say, competition upcoming, especially in the MBA arena, knowing that Germany was considered a non-MBA country.

“It’s complicated for a non-public institution, not to survive, but to really have a good performance, so that’s why we decided strategically we have to move to the top because to be a medium-ranked institution the survival rate is quite low, or you go down the chain and you produce bachelor’s in a kind of factory approach.”

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