B.C. schools go abroad for MBA students - Joanne Lee-Young

For years, China's blistering economy encouraged its best and brightest students to go abroad, get MBAs and return to steer its regional and national companies on the rise.

Later, with demand still teeming, Western institutions teamed up with Chinese schools to provide Western MBAs on the ground in China.

Now, homegrown Chinese MBA schools are emerging with a local edge to rival the cachet of Western-laced ones.
It is a market fraught with competition. For the most part, B.C. schools are just wading into it all, with many of their China-based programs only now pushing out an inaugural wave of graduates, a scattered few hundred, though more are in the pipeline.

There is, however, one interesting B.C. pioneer. It has awarded a notable 2,000-plus MBA degrees to students in more than 20 major, but also frontier-land cities across "greater China" (including the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan).

The unlikely example starts at Royal Roads University in Victoria, a campus that sits on a stately Edwardian-era estate with magnificent old stone buildings and immaculate, flowering gardens.

MBA course material developed here has been translated into Mandarin and delivered thousands of kilometres away to students in crowded, noisy, gritty cities via China-based affiliates such as the Tak Ming Institute of Management in Shanghai.

From there, Mathew Cheung, who immigrated to Toronto from Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, but now lives in Shanghai, has fanned out the Royal Roads MBA to students in a long list of cities: Taipei, Kaohshiung, Taichung and Hsinchu in Taiwan; Chengdu, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Xian, Hefei, Hangzhou, Nanjing (the list goes on) in mainland China, plus Hong Kong.

There are four other affiliates that stretch coverage to even more cities, such as Beijing, Qingdao, and Zhuhai, but Cheung's Tak Ming is the oldest and largest of Royal Roads' partners.

In fact, this year Cheung was honoured at a convocation ceremony in Victoria, when he reeled in his one-thousandth Royal Roads MBA degree recipient who is based in greater China.

"I was very happy, but the pressure is on to keep doing more," said Cheung in a phone interview from Shanghai.

The top student in Royal Roads' greater China graduating class of 700 this year actually studied at Tak Ming's centre in Taipei.

Joseph Chi is a 48-year-old executive with Protops Technologies Limited, which distributes graphics products for the Silicon Valley semiconductor giant, AMD, out of Taiwan. He started as an engineer, but his career, at Protops for the last decade and before that at other companies such as Apple in Taiwan, slowly veered toward sales and marketing business positions.

Chi chose the Royal Roads program "because it was an overseas university that is officially recognized in Taiwan." It allowed him to stay on home turf with his family and continue working, as classes are taught on weekends.

The Royal Roads model is still somewhat unique, but it was really different when Royal Roads started it in 1999.

"Most schools use China as a recruiting ground to bring students [to North America]. Ours is a different strategy that was more opportunistic than anything else to start with," Steven Grundy, associate vice-president of international studies at Royal Roads, said in an interview. "It was clear that there is a hot market in China and that the Chinese government wouldn't mind if students were developed there."

Cheung charges students different fees, depending on the location. In Taipei, the full program costs students $13,500 US; in central China's Xian, a more developing location, it costs $6,000 US. Royal Roads gets a flat percentage, which Cheung declined to disclose.

Cheung recruits students and faculty. They are then hand-vetted by Royal Roads' administrators in Victoria and a new office based in Hong Kong as of last year.

The idea of taking business education right into China via affiliates like this has since gained tread at other B.C. schools. North Vancouver-based Capilano College is in the first cycle of running a four-year undergraduate business program for mainland Chinese students in Harbin, a northeastern city near the Russian border.

Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops just graduated its second class of undergrad business students in Tianjin, a northern port city. Its first class of 120 students in a similar program in Shanghai will graduate in two weeks.

"We are small players compared with competition from schools in the U.K., the U.S. and Australia," said Grundy. For example, he noted that in one province, Shandong, there are as many as 80 MBA programs offered by foreign schools, mostly from those three markets, plus European ones that have also been very aggressive.

Despite this push, one of the newest developments in China's MBA market is the coming of age of local institutions such as the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Management in Beijing.

The biggest pitfall of training managers in China with Western theories, practices and case studies is that they can't necessarily apply those lessons when working in the trenches of corporate and entrepreneurial China. It's not a bad bet that schools like Cheung Kong represent the future of MBA education in China.

But for now, there seems to be little worry. Said Cheung of Tak Ming: "Schools like Cheung Kong target the CEOS, the titans of industry in China, the high-fliers. The Royal Roads program is about training the middle and upper managers below these, and there are lots of them."

In illustrating this specific focus on the mass market of the Chinese management world, Cheung added that unlike other foreign purveyors of business programs in China, "we knew from the beginning that if we taught our Royal Roads MBA program in English, it would limit the number of students and make it difficult to expand the program."