SKEMA Business School: The Global Educational Dream Of Alice Guilhon

‘WE DON’T LIKE TO HAVE SOMEONE TELL YOU WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO’

Indeed, her husband, who works in the police department in Nice, would love for her to slow down. Asked how he would describe her, she laughs and says, ‘He would say I am crazy because I am doing too much. I have a lot of ideas, and he is a little bit worried. He says, ‘You never stop and now you are 52 and it’s not possible to keep working at your pace.’ But I cannot stop.”

In an introspective moment, she notes that her unbounded ambition for the school may well be a reaction against her father whom she describes as “a very frozen academic.” She and her brother, who works in the jewelry business, have similar work habits. “We are very entrepreneurial together and we want absolutely to be independent. We don’t like to have someone tell you what you have to do,” she laughs.

Her expansion plans have been rooted in the belief that business education needs to be global. “You can’t stop that because it is now normal to give our students a worldwide education. This is a function of today’s generation. They want to move. They want to be mobile. They want to change and experience different cultures. We want to continue the deployment of the multi-national platform,” she says.

CREATING A NEW WAY OF LEARNING

“The second thing is the creation of a new way of learning,” adds Guilhon, noting the importance of leveraging technology to connect students across the school’s several campuses. “Students in this generation want to have another relationship through education. They can’t stay in a class for three hours listening to a professor who is doing a lesson. They want to use different devices to have access to the knowledge. It’s why we are working on what we call the SKEMA way of learning. This is a big challenge because we have to show our colleagues all over the world that it is possible to teach a course with students all over the world with partners. You can save a lot of time, a lot of money and increase the level of satisfaction with your students because they can work with other students from all over the world with dedicated tools. This will be their professional life in the future.

In this new model, she still believes the importance of faculty who produce new scholarly knowledge. “We cannot forget that we are researchers,” says Guilhon, who also wants to see faculty partner with companies in their research initiatives. “We are creators of knowledge and it is very important to create knowledge with impact. If we want to change the society we want, of course, we need to partner with companies and organizations to accomplish that.”

And like many of her socially-minded students, she wants to ensure that SKEMA not only deepens the business know-how of her students but also greatly contributes to a better society.
“Today we are a business school. I am transforming the school into a comprehensive institution addressing the problem of how education can contribute to better societies.”

TWO FLAGSHIP MASTER’S PROGRAMS IN FINANCIAL MARKETS AND INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS

The school does not have a traditional MBA program, but rather a range of pre- and post-experience specialty master’s degrees along with two undergraduate business programs. “We prefer to keep the name master of science for positioning because in the international market it is well known and not in competition with MBAs,” she says.

The two most popular MS degrees in SKEMA’s portfolio is a master’s in financial markets and investment and a master’s in international business. The former program receives more than 1,000 applications a year for an annual intake of not more than 130 students. The latter boasts more than 400 students and is ranked third by The Economist in its ranking of the best master’s in management programs.

And the school takes more of a business, rather than a stiff academic approach, to its offerings. “We target the needs of the market,” she says. When a new program takes off, the school goes for it. When something fails to catch on, Guilhon will shut it down. A program in sustainable development was closed because, she says, “young people have a lot of difficulty finding jobs in sustainable development.” Another program in entrepreneurship because it was launched in the North of France where startups are not all that prevalent.

‘WE ARE LOSING TIME’

Roughly 70% of the school’s programs are featured on multiple campuses. “We are able to teach 1,000 or 2,000 students at the same time on different campuses,” she says. “So now we have experience with that, it’s okay and our students love it. But it was not easy. We have a ten-year partnership with Microsoft, and they offered us all the technology for doing online education. Of course, it was a little bit stressful for our faculty because from one day to another they were obliged to switch immediately. But it is going very well. The students are satisfied and the faculty are okay.”

Guilhon, whose husband would describe her as a workaholic, expresses concern about the impact the pandemic is having on her plans. After all, over the next ten years, with the opening of three new campuses, she expects to have northward of 15,000 students, a budget of €180 million, 1,000 staff members and 265 faculty.

“We are losing time,” says Guilhon, “but we are learning a lot. Now we have to act because we are facing a big crisis. We have to learn how to change rapidly our way of teaching and working. We need to have a very positive view on that.

“The French people,” she adds, “are very critical. They often say, ‘Oh, it’s bad. It’s not good.’ I think that this is a fantastic opportunity to learn how to do better. If we have another crisis, I hope that we have learned through this one how to move quickly and adapt.”