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#7 - JRL 8327 - JRL Home
From: "Edwin Dolan" <dolanek@rockisland.com>
Subject: Re: Russian Business Schools
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004

Thanks to Peter Ekman for forwarding Kiril Yurov's letter on Business Education (JRL 8326). I share Yurov's concern about the state of business education in Russia, and fully support this view that representatives of government, the education establishment, and private business should work together to build a network of world-class business schools there. Unfortunately, I wish I could also be optimistic that this will soon happen, but I am not.

From 1990 to 2001, I taught economics, banking, and related subjects in various Moscow business schools, first at the Moscow Financial Academy and Moscow State University (MGU), and later at the American Institute of Business and Economics (AIBEc), an independent MBA program that my wife and I established in 1993. Peter Ekman worked with us at AIBEc as head of the finance program and later as Dean. My comments here are based on our experience during that period.

For its first four years, AIBEc operated in the main building of MGU, under the auspices of the faculty of geology. During that period we tried to broaden our base of support within the university by establishing good, cooperative relations both with the higher administration of MGU and with other economics and business departments there. Our efforts ran up against a set of attitudes that, I think, continue to slow development of business education in Russia to this day.

In large part, the problem seemed to be that far from viewing business education as an institutional priority toward which resources should be directed, the university administration viewed it as a cash cow to be milked, while businesses, sponsors, foreign donors, and student tuition were expected to take care of its feeding. This attitude was manifested not only in priorities among programs with the university, but often also in a tendency of administrators to put their own personal interests ahead of those of the institution. It was also reflected in a "pay to play" stance toward international educators, who, rather than being valued for the potentially complementary academic contributions they might make, were viewed with suspicion and allowed to participate only if they brought money, contacts, or something else tangible to the table.

Eventually we gave up on MGU and and moved AIBEc to a lower status and somewhat dilapidated location at the Moscow State Geological Prospecting Academy. The administration there was much more supportive and cooperative, although they had few resources and no prestige to share with us. Despite these problems, AIBEc made some solid accomplishments over the next few years. In 1998 a World Bank-sponsored survey of Russian business education ranked it the best school in the country in several key categories, including quality of the curriculum and loyalty of alumni. AIBEc students won more firsts in the American Chamber of Commerce MBA case competition than any other school, including still another win in 2004. And graduates have done very, very well on the job market.

Nevertheless, when we applied for international accredition, Russian representatives on the accreditation team gave a strongly negative report, placing heavy weight on the low status of our partner and its poor physical facilities, and also on excessive reliance on foreign instructors. (Only about a third of AIBEc courses were taught by Russians at that time.) The school also encountered repeated difficulties with educational licensing authorities, tax inspectors, and other branches of the bureaucracy. Support from the Education and Science Ministry, which Yurov would like to see as a key player in advancing business education, was absolutely zero.

Since leaving Moscow, my wife and I have taught in a number of business schools in other transition economies, including the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Central European University in Budapest, the International Graduate Business School in Zagreb, and, coming up this fall, the American University in Bulgaria. All of these programs are hands-down better than any business education offered in Russia. All of these manage to make use of strong international academic inputs while maintaing good relations with local authorities, local educators, and local businesses.

Meanwhile, although I am no longer actively involved in Russian business education, I continue to receive news on what goes on there. Here is a detail that I see as possibly symptomatic: Each year RABO, the main professional organiation for business education in Russia, holds its annual conference in some world pleasure spot like the Coast of Spain, Thailand, or Goa. In sending themselves off on costly junkets abroad rather than investing those resources in their own programs, are administrators of these often cash-starved schools giving their students good value for money? Or is this just another sign of the milk-the-cow syndrome?