Lancaster University Management School

The Lancaster MBA: What You Need To Know

If you think business schools are all about shiny steel-and-glass buildings in the heart of bustling cities, then think again. Lancaster University Management School in the northeast of England is set in a 560-acre green-field campus surrounded by stunning sea, city and countryside locations and has been graduating MBAs since 1989. Lancaster sits on the doorstep of the Lake District, the most spectacular and famous region of countryside in the country, where the school takes students for reflection and team-building exercises, sometimes in Lancaster’s historic castle.

This year, the MBA program was ranked 8th in the UK by The Economist. It welcomed 69 students into the 11-month program that begins in October and ends in August. Lancaster’s class sizes are small yet diverse, with over 20 nationalities in the mix. To apply to the program, an online application is required in addition to an interview with their course director.

Twelve weeks of the program are spent in London. There is plenty of practical work, most notably in the four Active Learning Challenges: The Management Challenge, Entrepreneurial Challenge, Consultancy Challenge, and Corporate Challenge, the latter of which takes students to London for six to eight weeks. In the second term, students go on an overseas study tour.

LUMS also covers the core MBA subjects such as Finance, Marketing, and Strategic Management, and like many progressive schools throws in one on Responsible Management and Ethics, too. Their Mindful Manager course aims to build “business wisdom” and explore the “art and craft” of management alongside a “personal reflection tutor” who helps students to analyze their own biases and motivations. This runs alongside a course in Cognitive Conduct, which helps students learn how to “construct and deconstruct” arguments.

Dr. Peter Lenney, Program Director of the full-time MBA:

Here at Lancaster we have set about building the sort of MBA I wish I’d done before I became the director of a multinational company. Indeed, it’s the sort of MBA I wish my managers had done. We give our students the necessary training in the functional disciplines. However, unlike most other MBAs, we also provide a highly practical program with a central mission to develop in our students the essential capacity for exercising quality business judgment in the complex, turbulent, uncertain, and often ambiguous world of business.

Bharti Syal, MBA 2018

I have six years of work experience in digital transformation, working in India and London, but I wanted a broader business understanding. In particular, I wanted to specialize in strategy, and Lancaster is excellent in that. The cohort is small, which means that you get to know everyone personally and the faculty have time for everybody. I have learned a lot from the Mindful Manager aspect of the course. I have certainly developed the questioning habit and become far more critical and skeptical — not just with others, but with myself as well. I ask questions about my own decisions, which helps me not make the same mistakes again. When I talk to alumni, they say that this aspect of the course certainly has a long-term impact.

Lancaster MBA Rankings Data

Lancaster MBA Employment Stats

Lancaster prefers to list all employers of graduate MBAs rather than list top hirers.

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