Only 2% of those who take the Master in Management at WHU Beisheim are from North America. Courtesy photo
While the MBA is still the best-recognized business education brand in the United States, in continental Europe the Master in Management, or MiM, is the number-one business program. So — what is it? And why is it so popular?
The MiM can have various names, such as a Master’s in Strategy and International Management or a Master’s in International Management, but all fulfill the same purpose. They are pre-experience master’s programs aimed at students who have just completed a bachelor’s degree. The MiM is a generalist business qualification with core courses in economics, marketing, strategy and so on, and while the content varies across business schools — with some offering more electives and other add-ons — the aim is the same: to give someone’s career a jump-start.
Research into European MiMs by the Graduate Management Admission Council has found that the average age of a MiM student is 22.7 years, and that 78% of MiM students have some kind of business bachelor’s degree. However, much depends on the business school. At Erasmus University’s Rotterdam School of Management in Holland, for instance, very few students have a business background. At London Business School, around 40% do. At HEC Paris, only 30% do. When GMAC asked students what they hoped to get from their MiM, the top three answers were “general business knowledge,” “leadership skills,” and “management skills.”
WHY IS THE MiM SO POPULAR IN EUROPE? IT’S CULTURAL
Kiron Ravindran of IE Business School. IE photo
Many MiMs, especially at public universities, are taught in the language of the country they are in. These are, plainly, aimed at locals. Some of the top-tier private schools, however, run English-language MiMs that attract a global class with as many nationalities as an MBA. Most MiMs are two years long, though some are shorter. Some schools offer double degrees with their MiMs.
Why is the MiM so popular? It’s cultural. MiMs slot nicely into the traditional shape of European education. Continental students generally stay in university education after their undergraduate degree, taking a diploma, before entering the workforce in their mid-20s. “I think to some extent there is a legacy of how master’s education has been in Europe that has led to the popularity of the degree,” says Kiron Ravindran, associate dean of the Master in Management programs at Madrid’s IE Business School, who is also the school’s representative to the International MiM Association for schools across Europe. “Over time that model builds in, and in France especially they have the Grande Ecoles system which facilitates your choice to do a master’s even better. I think that’s really the trigger.”
This is very different from tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries, where people tend to graduate and get a job straightaway, then think about business education later. “I think historically in Europe, the idea of doing a master’s has been part of the education model,” Ravindran says. “You see that in the way a MiM is usually funded. In our case, 80% of it is funded by parents. In the U.S., a master’s degree is something that you fund on your own, and as a result you probably built up some capital over time, having worked.” This economic fact means that Europeans tend to favor taking a master’s before they begin their career, rather than once they have had a few years’ experience — and some savings — under their belts.
BOLOGNA AND THE MiM MARKET
Steffen Loev, program director of the MiM at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Vallendar, Germany, says the career-oriented nature of European education plays a part, too. “In the United States, the system is that undergraduate students have very general courses of study. In Europe they decide completely after leaving school which kind of professional career they want to develop later on,” Loev says. “They mostly have to choose directly from the beginning when they’ve started their university career in which academic field they want to go to — be it business studies, be it medicine or something else. This has been happening for some decades.”
While the five-year university tradition is old, it was a declaration by 29 countries’ education ministers in 1999 that kick-started something called the Bologna Declaration, which shook up higher education in Europe and specifically created the market for the MiM. Previously, European tertiary education was split into two parts: a five-year degree, followed by a Ph.D. The Bologna declaration created a three-tier system, splitting the five-year first degree into three-year undergraduate and two-year post-graduate degrees. By the time this came into force in 2010, 48 countries across Europe were signed up to a unified system. One effect of the Bologna Declaration was to open up a pan-European market in higher education, so that students could take a three-year degree in one university then move to another anywhere in Europe for their master’s. Business schools could now compete for talent from across the continent, and courses like the MiM sprang up to take advantage.
Who takes a MiM? That varies hugely between schools. At some, the majority is from the home country. WHU says only around 2% are from North America. The current ESSEC course has three Americans. At the other end of the spectrum is the hugely international CEMS course, a collaboration between 31 schools globally with around 70 nationalities. In the middle are schools like Madrid’s IE, where about a quarter of MiM students are Spanish, another quarter from other European countries and the other half from the rest of the world. In recent years more Asian students have started to take MiMs; some students see the degree as a “passport to Europe,” says Irma Bogenrieder, academic director of the Master in Management at RSM in the Netherlands. “Many of them want to stay at least temporarily. Many of them are here just to gain experience and don’t know whether they will stay,” she says. Others, she says, realise that their bachelor’s degree won’t get them the sort of job they want, or have been working for a year or two and decide that they need an extra boost.
Another group are people such as scientists of engineers who do not want to get stuck in labs or R&D departments, and see a MiM an an escape route to general management roles. There is a trend for students from India who have taken a business degree there — perhaps even a master’s — to then come to Europe to join a MiM program that they feel will give them more prestige.
The MiM student population at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain is about 25% Spanish — and 75% international. IE photo
What is a MiM course like? Again, it depends. On courses where all or most of the students come from the same country or background, they will tend to start with a similar skill set and so can all be taught more or less the same course. For those such as WHU that recruit from over 40 schools in many countries, there has to be more flexibility to address students’ varying strengths and weaknesses. Whatever the starting point, the aim is to give students a solid, general business grounding.
“The focus is on giving students a broad and rigorous foundation in the core management disciplines, which includes data analytics, finance, strategy, accounting, marketing, and so on,” says Gareth Howells, executive director of the MBA, MiF & Early Career programs at London Business School. Just like an MBA, many schools offer courses in interpersonal, numerical and digital skills, which can include computer programming, Howells says. Most MiMs have projects with local businesses, field trips and immersion experiences.
But a MiM differs from an MBA in several respects. For a start, the teaching style tends to be more didactic.
“In the MBA, it’s usually far more open, and you choose your path, but the MiM to some extent is guided,” says Kiron Ravindran of IE. Whatever their undergraduate education, MiM students are alike in having little experience of the working world, so the course tends to be more academic than an MBA, where students typically have around six years’ experience and a range of skills and experiences picked up during their career, and the pedagogy revolves around case studies, teamwork, and sparking self-knowledge. MiMs tend to be more structured and focused on delivering knowledge.
THE BREADTH OF LEARNING IN A MiM PROGRAM
London Business School’s Gareth Howells. Courtesy photo
One area where this can be seen in practice is the number of electives MiMs typically offer. While an MBA might take a dozen electives, a MiM student might take just three. Of course, this varies between schools. Institutions with a large number of specialized master’s courses can be pretty sure that someone who chose their MiM is interested in general management. Other schools which don’t offer a host of specialized alternatives might offer electives in (say) data analytics or luxury goods management, to make sure there’s something for everyone. This is not to say that a MiM’s focus on core subjects mean it is inflexible. Schools are constantly adding courses in hot new subjects like digital disruption or analytics, and because they already have experts teaching these subjects to MBAs in depth, they are able to develop MiM-level courses very quickly.
What do MiM students say about their motivations for taking the qualification? Mate Kovacs, a Hungarian currently studying on the CEMS MiM and based at RSM in Rotterdam, says: “A MiM is a very European thing to do. People in my peer group think that they are not complete once they’ve done their undergraduate degree, and an obvious next step is to do your master’s. It feels like a continuation. I think for some students the MiM is a chance to re-brand themselves. I did my undergraduate degree in Hungary at a not-very-well-known institution, and I’m hoping that now recruiters will see me as a graduate of RSM. I think a lot of students who went to smaller universities see a MiM as a chance to go to a bigger university to finish their education.” RSM, like many schools, offers a low price to EU students, and its 18-month duration appeals to students keen to get into the world of work.
Someone with a different story is Mat Schuck, an American who is taking the MiM at ESSEC in France. He has worked for a French company in the states, and after meeting French people who were living in the U.S. made me think that one day he might fancy the expat life. After graduating with an engineering degree, he worked for two years but decided that life as an engineer was not for him. He didn’t have the experience for an MBA, but decided that a MiM in Europe would kill two birds with one stone.
“I realized that I didn’t want to be an engineer for my whole career. I like working with people, so I thought that a general management qualification would be the route to that,” Schuck says. “My only concern is that back in the U.S. employers might not recognize a MiM, so I’m looking at getting my first job after graduation, at least, in France.”
THE GOLD STANDARD OF EUROPEAN BIZ ED
For many students the MiM is a way to change course and widen their worldview in other ways, too. “An example of how the MiM can change your perspective is one of my students, an IT engineer, who said to me that in the past if he had been told that an ATM had broken down, he would have only looked at the technical, mechanical side,” says RSM’s Irma Bogenrieder. “But now he says he would see it from a client perspective, from a communications perspective, and from the perspective of which internal organisational processes would you need to fix the problem. These students learn to take a broader view.”
The MiM is clearly the dominant general management business degree in Europe. But how is the MiM landscape changing? Perhaps one evolution is that schools are becoming more open to the idea of taking students with a bit of work experience onto their MiMs, as well as the traditional pre-experience crowd. “Years ago universities said that you had to do your master’s straight after a bachelor’s, and you couldn’t have a gap in between, but now universities often allow students with two or even three years’ experience,” says WHU’s Steffen Loev.
This is having a knock-on effect on European MBAs. Although the MBA has never been as popular in Europe as it is in the U.S., or even the UK, it was seen as a qualification for businesspeople to deepen their knowledge. Increasingly in Europe, it is being squeezed by the MiM and is now coming to be seen as something for people with no business training who are looking for a career change. For many reasons, the MiM’s reputation as the gold standard of European business education is here to stay.
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