Canadian b schools and US B schools

Question

Hi All,

Could you please tell me if Concordia and UBC (Canadian B-schools) are better than George Washington and Tulane Freeman (US B schools)?

Shridhar

skovinsky · Answer

Hi!

You ask a very common question, "Is school X better than school Y?", that has no simple answer.

Business schools are very different than other professional programs. If you had asked "is law school A better than law school B?" or "is med school #1 better than med school #2?", you'd get a fairly straightforward answer. However, business schools are a lot more complex.

The first thing to note is that every business school has a unique program and, even more importantly, network. Since networking is one of the primary benefits of attending business school, you need to identify your target network before choosing the program that best suits your needs.

So, for example, if you want to work in Vancouver (or even the Pacific Rim in general), then Sauder (UBC) is going to give you great contacts for your post-MBA employment. Tulane, on the other hand, is on the opposite side of North America and, even though it's a respected school, would offer little or no employment opportunities on the West Coast.

Second, you need to think about what skill set you hope to gain, since different schools offer different specialties.

Third, you need to think about your own learning style and what programs teach the way you like to learn.

It's certainly possible to do a google search on those schools and see where they lie in various rankings, but there are a lot of different rankings out there and not all schools choose to participate (not many people know this, but it's actually very expensive for schools to participate in rankings and some choose to spend their money elsewhere to recruit in different ways). Rankings can be a useful guideline, but finding the school that's going to get you gainfully employed in your field of choice is far more important than where the school sits on someone's list.

Good luck in your studies!

Schawjibb · Answer

Can you please, skovinsky, help me in one regard? While choosing B-schools, should I also take care of the attached university ranking? Will it give me any further benefit? For instance, UBC ranking as a university is very good world-wide which may give me an ultimate brand value while networking (though it's B-school is in the last quartile of Economist and FT ranking). Whereas, U of Western Ontario is pretty much unknown to the world as well as unranked university, and maybe has far lesser number of Alumni worldwide; but it's B-school students really have good avg salary, employment rate and such. And, Thunderbird is not at all under/with any university and run independently.

I have narrowed down my focus B-school list to 15 which are well fit with me as long as career, interest, mobility, teaching quality and facility are concerned. However, now I am planning to make the list even narrower maybe to 7/8. I want to choose a B-school with a good balance between university ranking as well as the ranking of the the school itself. But, I will leave this if B-school means B-school only, and university ranking and renounce has nothing to do with it.

Please, help which focus should be given more weight.

skovinsky · Answer

Hi,

since you'll be parlaying your MBA into a new job in the business world, the only name recognition that really matters is that of the MBA itself. So, while UBC might be better known in general, people hiring recent MBA grads only care about the business school's reputation.

The exception would be if you're applying for jobs that aren't traditional MBA streams and you think that the hiring manager won't be familiar with b-schools; if that's the case, then the reputation of the university as a whole could be relevant.

Canadian b schools and US B schools

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