Hi,

I need some advice on choosing MBA course in London. My choices are GSM,LBSF, Kensington College of Business. First choice and third choice are awarded by University of Wales and the fee is £6000. The second choice is ranked and recognised as claimed in their website and fee is £14500. All are 12 months in length. Please follow the link below to their website. I would like to know the comparison between them in term of quality, worth for money and career prospective after graduation (the most important one). Any past alumi student comment would be great.

In addition, I want to specialise in either MBA Finance, MBA Strategic Management OR MBA Innovation, Technology and Change. I need to choose one. Please advice me in term of demanding in the current and future business world.

Many many THANKS for those contributed. I am sure it will help other too.

1) http://www.greenwich-college.ac.uk/programmes-courses/postgraduate/mba/w/master-of-business-administration-mba-london.asp
2) http://www.lsbf.org.uk/programmes/masters/mba/lsbf-mba/syllabus.html
3) http://www.kensingtoncoll.ac.uk/

Why did you narrow it down to those three schools? I think there are much better schools in the UK (ranked and accrdited by AMBA, Equis or AACSB).

Personally, I would avoid schools awarding degrees by the University of Wales, because there are so many of them that no one can even remember the names of those schools.

Fees of £6000 or 14500 may be considerably lower than at ranked and fully accredited schools, but it is still a ot of money to be wasted.

hI malia, Thanks for your post though.
After posted, I went into deep research and found out the advice you gave is 100% trustable. The good MBA is around £33k!! But this is too much for me. But I found around £16k in University of Westmister which ias accredited by AMBA. What is your recommendation School in London or other school in UK?

What is the best course to take as pre MBA course as most of the course start in Jan, Feb, Oct 2011. As now, I am free and want to start prepare for MBA as I know it is an intensive course. Any advice?What pre course and good school?

I'm not an expert on UK schools, but Westminster seems to be a valid business school, even though it does not have the best reputation. Another cheaper option could be Leicester (AMBA accredited, £15,750 for FT MBA):
http://www.le.ac.uk/ulmc/fees/fees.html?
http://www.le.ac.uk/ulmc/ft_mba.html?

Lancaster (ranked 24th in the world by the Financial Times) charges £23,500 for their full-time MBA:
http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/masters/mba/

There are some other Find-MBA forum members who have better insights into UK b-schools, including the ones outside London. Maybe they have some other suggestions for you.

I agree with Malia. Unfortunately I don't see a lot of value in the MBA courses you mention. Better to save the money (and a year of your life) than go to these. LSBF especially is widely discredited, and an institution that doesn't award its own degrees but relies of the University of Wales to do it for them isn't to be taken that seriously.

I would focus on the low to mid-priced UK schools - £20-35k - and see if you can get a scholarship from one of them, if necessary saving up for another year or two to go there.

Hey, Thanks for those posts. Mistermark and Malia, have you both been through MBA course? It is worth for the money when graduated? Some claimed for earning £50-60k? Is that true?How about the name of the school, good name give you higher salary?Now I might hold back for MBA for the moment, I want to find a good B-school and make sure quality and not too costly.

Please if anyone have been through a MBA course please post the advice here. I am totally open now, anywhere in the world. cheers:)

Thanks Malia and Mistermark!

hiya,
Couldn't help noticing your confusion. First start by asking your self what kind of school you are looking for. Is it based on fees? accreditation? location? reputation? etc
You can start by checking the Financial Times global MBA ranking- check for it online/google it. You can then tick of the UK schools. Start looking from around the 9th ranked ones(UK) for the price range you are looking for. Lancaster is a good school, highly ranked and not so expensive.
Also look out for triple accreditated schools (that way your MBA would recognised in the USA as well).
When you've picked like 5 schools you can then go to their websites and learn more about them.
The schools you mentioned at the begining of your post is not worth your money especially if you are looking to make your MBA work for you. An MBA is about prestige as well as knowledge so a good BS matters.
Cheers

HI,
What is the length of MBA course that consider as quality or perhap look like quality.As normally cheap fee is 12 months and then 18 months and to 2 years. So what is the best one to go for? Some accelerated the course and claim fast track then it might crash your mind; as too slow not yielding, too fast crash.

So what length is yielding!!Yet balance.

Hey, Thanks for those posts. Mistermark and Malia, have you both been through MBA course? It is worth for the money when graduated? Some claimed for earning £50-60k? Is that true?How about the name of the school, good name give you higher salary?Now I might hold back for MBA for the moment, I want to find a good B-school and make sure quality and not too costly.

Please if anyone have been through a MBA course please post the advice here. I am totally open now, anywhere in the world. cheers:)

Thanks Malia and Mistermark!

@MisterMark
First of all i agree with you that due to a loopsided nature of jobs that alumni of LBS end up in (banking) their post MBA salaries tend to be higher.
However i disagree on these- Henley and Ashridge are not even ranked by the FT global ranking. They are good schools though but are generally more noted for executive MBAs and not full time MBAs hence they attract older applicants(also due to their strict requirement of several years of SENIOR managerial experience).
Warwick is around 22,800GBP and not in the >30,000 range you put it. Also Aston (22,000GBP), Durham(19,500GBP) are very good business schools which made it into the top world 100 at 73 and 74th respectively. They are very well worth the money too! Ideally for them to make into the ranking they are worth it.

I agree that Henley and Ashridge aren't ranked by the FT, but they are by others, and when they appear in rankings they tend to do well.

As with LBS, it's important to take their rankings with a pinch of salt because they include factors such as % salary uplift that disadvantage these schools, which on average recruit older students who are therefore already on higher salaries; similarly, courses with a high proportion of executive (i.e. part-time) students are disadvantaged in the rankings because they're likely to be on higher salaries initially (that they don't want to give up) and are much more likely already to be resident in a high-income country, namely the UK. In contrast, Lancaster appears to do well, but when you look in more detail, it's recruiting a large percentage of students from India, where salaries are lower, many of whom stay in the UK, where they are higher, once they've graduated - resulting in a high apparent uplift in salary, even if they may be doing jobs that are no more responsible than previously, and may have taken drops in standard of living (the purchasing power parity issue).

Re Warwick, I take your point, it has low fees relative to its OK ranking. I wouldn't put Aston and Durham in the same league as Warwick, which in turn I don't think is comparable to the institutions I mentioned in the £30-40k league.

@MisterMark,
I agree with you, Aston and Durham are not in the same league as Warwick & co. They are still good schools for those that can't afford the higher fees of the Cranfield and co.
However, I do beleive Warwick is comparable to Imperial and Manchester...maybe its below cranfield, oxford and cambridge but its up there with Imperial and co...I even think its better than Imperial.
As per your other analysis on the salary issues, you are quite right.

Quick question: apparently these Business Schools have their specialities e.g LBS/CASS are good with finance, Warwick is good in consultancy. What about the others? any ideas?

I've often heard people associating Warwick with marketing, rather than consultancy. Cranfield seems to have good links with consultancy, the car industry and supply chain/logistics. Ashridge appears to be over-represented in the pharma and airline sectors. I'm not sure about Oxford and Cambridge.

kyn6339 ,

I'm a full time MBA student at Westminster Business School and I would like to give you some info that may help you with your choice.

a. Westminster is definitely in your budget range

b. Westminster has a great reputation in London, and the UK government recently chose the Westminster EMBA program to be #1 in terms of Value.

c. Westminster is highly competent in module selection and delivery. One example is the Social Entrepreneurship elective module which was designed this Summer wherein our class got a chance to share our skills with charities in Kampala, Uganda for 2 weeks. You can read more about that here, http://blog.business.westminster.ac.uk/mba/
and here http://blog.business.westminster.ac.uk/socialentrepreneurship/.

d. Proximity to the city businesses gives Westminster a huge advantage in terms of networking. For e.g., Westminster has a program called Tuesday Club for MBAs where an industry expert is invited to give a seminar / presentation every fortnight and we use this forum for some valuable networking opps.

e. Westminster is highly diverse and I would consider this one of the core competencies. For e.g., we have discussions in class for say in Ethics or Leadership or Strategy modules and each member of our FT cohort has a rich and interesting opinion which is truly unique. Our class comprises of experienced students from turkey, japan, ethiopia, india, brazil, ukraine and south africa.

Your welcome to reach me at my email or on this board for more information and I'll be glad to help.

Well I've heard about the Westminister business school. its an ok school but in these trying times one should look for as much as they can get for their money...kyn6339 should go for a highly ranked school that falls within his budget and there are some that meet that criteria.

@Mistermark
Warwick..marketing?well I hear of Warwick mostly in connection with consulting and yes Cranfield is great for consulting too.
So what about Manchester, lancaster, Aston, Durham, Imperial...what are they known for? Is there Business school outside of London that is know for finance?

I'm not sure that the other business schools you mention are known for particular specialisms, or that there's a school outside of London that is closely associated with finance (not least for geographical reasons, the capital being the centre of the UK's financial services industry).

Manchester is very well known for finance. Although it is not as specialised as Cass. Many banks have their operations (back and middle office) functions based there.

If you want to to be an investment banker, an MBA is not the way. A specialist masters in finance, again from LBS, Cass, LSE, Manchester or Henley would stand you in better stead. If you want general finance experience to work in a firm, the MBA location shouldn't matter. The university/course should!

Despite being London based myself, there are LOTS of large finance houses outside of London, especially in Manchester and Edinburgh. If you got an MBA/Msc from an internationally recognised business school (Top 2 Tiers), do you think the first thought from your potential employer would be:

1. They're not from London so I'm not interested

Or

2. They've proved themselves at one of the toughest schools in the world and are now looking a for a job

There are lots of very average/below average business schools that trade on the image of being close to the City, Westminster being one. The quality of teaching is not world class, the facilities are not world class, the standard of student is not world class and the qualification is not world class.

If worried about cost, Lancaster, Durham or Edinburgh are the best options. The only respectable schools not in tier 2 below £30k.

@MisterMark and @ lemming176
Thanks for your analysis!! great job.
I've often been told that if someone was interested in finance or consulting that the person should look at at Business Schools that are located in large cities e.g London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh etc hence the reason I was looking in that direction.
I'm not interested in investment banking(despite their huge bonus payouts, hahaha)..however I'm interested in management consulting, risk management or finance roles in multinationals.
@ lemming176- could you help me define these tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 schools. It seems that everyone has a different seperation technique.
The schools in the 'tier 1' and most in the 'tier 2' are rather too expensive.. most are 33,000GBP above. So what are your views on Lancaster, Durham,Warwick, Aston and Strathcylde. What are their specialities?

well a healthy discussion is going on here about different buisness schools and their specialities.

my view is that for marketings-cass best and then aston.

for finance-lbs,cass then manchester.

consultancy-cranfield.

if you wana go for cheap buisness school then i will say lancaster and durham.for finance or consulting warwick will be good.

@ Milindparihar,
Thanks for ur analysis. In summary u r saying CASS and aston for marketing; LBS,CSS, MBS for finance. Then Warwick for finace and consulting. Whats Durham n Lancaster known for then/
I am interested in the er....cheaper business schools. all the tier 1, 2 schools are too expensive and their entry criteria r too steep...guess thats why they are tier 1 schools.
so the schools that i am actually looking at are Cranfield (reasonably priced for a tier 2 BS), Warwick, Lancaster, Aston and Durham. I am interested in finance and consultancy. My interest in finance is not aimed at getting into investment banking but a finance role in a multinational. I am already a certified chartered accountant so I don't want the investment banking route which is what CASS and LBS is about.
So what is your advice on Business Schools that would be suitable for me?
I am also interested in hearing more about other schools and their 'specialities'

Thanks