Feeling Bullish At Durham University Business School

Led by Susan Hart since 2016, Durham University Business School has big relocation plans that include the construction of a new £70m building in the Durham city center. Durham Business School

Whether it’s women or men, one of the things that attract people to business schools is, for good or ill, a school’s position in the rankings. So that’s my segue to ask you about the most recent Financial Times rankings. In the Global ranking, Durham has made some incredible jumps in the last two years, going from 75th to 43rd; just your one-year jump from last year to this year was one of the biggest jumps of any school, from 64th to 43rd. So I want to get your impression of how The Financial Times has ranked you and what you think they’re looking at that they’ve esteemed you to be so successful in the last two years.

Well, I think we all know that The Financial Times is heavily weighted toward salary. What I think is happening there is, we’ve been investing significantly in our careers team and supporting the careers team that supports students. So it’s a much more common thing in the States, particularly at top schools in the States, to actually place students in jobs; and that concept does not exist to the same extent outside of the States. That’s the first thing.

I think the second thing is that it’s kind of a self-perpetuating thing really in the top 10; when you look at the top 10 in The Financial Times they are the big schools, they are the historic schools that have been there for many long years. They’re hugely, but not exclusively, part of large, historic universities; I’m thinking Harvard, I’m thinking MIT, I’m thinking Oxford, I’m thinking Cambridge. And these are institutions that have big alumni bases, and therefore big networks that can be drawn on to help place more recent graduates. So I think that there’s a stability there that’s very hard to break into. Having said that, I think what we’ve been doing is focusing very clearly on trying to help students better prepare for work, and we’ve taken that careers focus and not just made it in the UK, but actually made it part of some of the major markets that our students come from. We’re actually working with careers and employers outside of the UK to introduce students that are going to be our graduates from there.

We’ve done a lot of specific work on that. We’ve done a lot of work on preparing them better for the employment market. That’s been quite focused and targeted work. Broadly, all the other categories are between 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 percentage points toward that overall ranking. With the exception of research, which I’ll come to in a minute. But all of the other things I think we want to pay attention to, not because they’re in rankings, but because they’re important.

Things that matter to The Financial Times are if you have an industrial advisory board, does that have a gender balance? Is it international? And what’s the gender balance of people who are teaching on the programs? All of those things are things that are important to what I want to achieve for Durham University Business School as a whole, so I am very focused on gender, and indeed ethnic balance as well, in the teaching and in our advisory board. And we’ve made some changes in that over the last five years. Again, not exclusively in any way to chase the rankings, but because actually, that’s the kind of school we want to build. We want the value to the school to be ones of recognizing diversity and ethnicity and also in gender.

The corollary to talking about the Global ranking, obviously, is the online ranking, which just came out recently. They only rank ten schools, and you’re one of the ten. So in that regard, that’s great. But you slipped from fifth to seventh. So I just want to get your thoughts on what happened there. You’re still in the ten, and you’ve got some great marks on the metrics that they use there, but why did it drop from five to seven do you think?

Again, if you look at the salary columns, the salary column is the one that’s making the big difference in that particular one. What is interesting to me is that there are only ten when last year it had moved up to 15 or 16. I can only assume that either schools were not weighing into the rankings, or they didn’t get sufficient feedback, because the way the rankings work is you have to get a particular percentage of the students filling in the forms.

And so I think what’s important there, and I think what we’ve been trying to do well here, is we are very engaged with our online students. So yes, it’s an online program, but we keep in touch with them. It’s not just you fill this in remotely and then we expect you to fill in the FT forms for us. We keep in touch with our students while they are students, and we keep in touch with them when they are no longer students to find out what they’re doing — we’re interested in what they do, we track what they do, we bring them back to meet current students, and so we engage with them. So it is an online program, but the experience we’ve tried to preserve has an element of contact.

I saw that your online MBA is a majority of UK students, with 52% based in the UK. This is obviously in contrast with your full-time MBA which is overwhelmingly international. Is there an interest in internationalizing your online MBA or spreading the word?

We do want to internationalize it more, but what I think that also reflects is the two things are not unrelated, in that we know that the market for full-time MBA study in the UK is a slowly declining market — whereas we know that the market for flexible study of MBA is a growing market in the UK.

And so, growing that over time is important as well, but what’s more important is to make sure that we’re trying not to get a dominance of anyone. So we’ve got 52% of people from the UK, we would like to have more different nationalities in there to make sure that when the online exercises happen and the group exercises happen, and even when we run the seminars where you are required to come here, they are still getting that international experience which I think is incredibly important.

We mix them up in any case, on several occasions throughout the year, with not only our full-time but we have a small executive program that we run with the European Business School in Germany. It’s too small to enter into the executive MBA rankings, which is probably why it’s not something that’s apparent to you. I think this year we have 28 students in that, so that’s kind of small. And we just restarted that degree, because it had run for a few years and then there hadn’t been a lot of investment in it for a couple of years before I arrived here as dean. But when I looked I thought, “This is a good school, this is an interesting program, this got some very high caliber of students in the past, I think we should try and look at kickstarting that again,” which we did.

So we bring the three lots together: we bring the Durham full-time MBA, we bring the part-time, and we bring the online together, and that really is a fantastic mix of students for certain programs, for certain seminars, and for certain classes. It doesn’t happen all the time obviously, because the EBS one’s are studying mostly in Germany, the full-time ones are mostly in Durham, and online are all over the world; but we do try to mix them up on a few occasions during the year.

I have to ask because it’s dominating the news, but for that program, for other programs, for internationalization efforts, or goals … 

I know what you’re gonna have to bring. (Laughs)

You know where I’m headed, right? So do you have concerns? I mean, at this point we’re not even sure when it will happen, or I suppose there’s still a possibility that it won’t — but Brexit is on everybody’s mind, isn’t it?

It sure is. It would be foolish not to be at the very least keeping an eye on matters. What we’ve done so far, and again I’ve done this with this year’s full-time MBA, I meet the MBA students informally; I think it’s important that they have sight of the staff if you’re head of the school. I’ve got no illusions — it’s not a personal thing, it’s just they want the leadership to be interested in them.

So I meet them and we have lunch and we talk these things over; and we’ve also done broad surveys which suggest that in the UK, either 63% or 64% of students who have come, both undergraduate and post-graduate, right across the UK, would be completely unaffected by Brexit. That’s almost touted as, “So we don’t have to worry.” I look at that statistic and say, “Hmm, 60% say yes, so that means that 37% might not have come” — and that’s a heck of a number.

So the average person has said it wouldn’t make a difference. And that surprised me, so part of me thinks, “Are they telling me what they think I want to hear? Or is this something that is going to affect them?” So I probe on that and what they’ve said to me is, they’re interested in rankings, they’re interested also in accreditation. They’re looking at accredited schools, and they’re looking at the content of what they’re going to receive when they’re there.

I think the other thing that drives us is, we have an extremely high score for value for money. So we’re nowhere near the top in the price league for being a Financial Times top 100 school. I think that’s an attraction. And that’s something that I want to make sure that we are doing — giving good value for money. I feel very strongly that, online aside, the full-time students are not only giving up their salary, but they’re also all moving, sometimes there’s family, and there’s the actual expense of living income-free for a year, so I think it’s incumbent upon us to make a difference to them.

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