As a new partnership in Asia gives a different face to the Fuqua School of Business' globalization efforts, administrators are also looking to touch up an older venture in Europe.
Last week, Fuqua officials announced a new partnership with Seoul National University, which would in part expand the Cross-Continent MBA program from the United States and Europe to South Korea.
In partnering with Seoul National, Fuqua is shifting its international strategy from a build-your-own-campus model to an alliance-based model, reducing risk, resource burden and possible exposure problems for Fuqua.
Those officials are also using the alliance as a boost in attracting students to the business school's European satellite in Frankfurt, Germany.
"[Creating and maintaining a European campus] did help and inform the partnership in the sense that we partnered with the one existing major university that's the best in Korea and one of the best in Asia," said Fuqua Dean Douglas Breeden. "We didn't do that in Europe. We did it by ourselves. It's competitive and hard to get your name going."
Breeden said the Fuqua School of Business Europe in Frankfurt, whose sponsors include DeutscheBank and the German Stock Exchange, may change its location, currently a hotel near the Frankfurt airport.
The campus has also made small personnel changes while redoubling efforts to attract European students to the Cross-Continent MBA program.
"We have changed our hotel commitment so that we're not tied down to one location there, and we are expecting to improve the facilities in Europe that we use," he said.
Breeden added that last year, they moved Fuqua School of Business Europe Dean Robert Ashton, Martin L. Black, Jr. professor of business, out of his Frankfurt apartment, where he was to reside for half of every year. Now, Ashton works in Durham but travels back and forth to Frankfurt. The savings to Fuqua, Breeden said, have been between $300,000 and $400,000.
The Frankfurt effort had not gone as smoothly as hoped, Fuqua officials admitted last year, due to the difficulty of competing head-on with better-known universities. In addition, some students had found the school's facilities less than appealing.
Yet Breeden noted that Ashton and Dan Nagy, associate dean and director of MBA programs, were both aggressively marketing the Cross-Continent program all across Europe.
Nagy said that on a recent trip to Moscow, an information session attracted over 80 people. Usually, in large cities like London, Paris and Warsaw, similar sessions attract about 10, he said.
"[Europe's] a tougher sell," Nagy said. "We're actually starting to tap new markets. The German market will always be a more reserved one, not as active. What we're finding is that by expanding, going to Switzerland, going to Moscow, going to Paris, those are markets that we're finding are more interesting marketplaces. We'll always take a certain number of Germans, but our growth will come from other countries."
Nagy said the program competes both with other joint efforts, such as that of the London School of Economics-Columbia University program and a University of Chicago campus in Barcelona. In addition, other top European MBA programs, such as those offered at the International Institute for Managerial Development in Switzerland and INSEAD in France, also attract top students.
Yet the program must also deal with a European business climate not so fully sold on the MBA's value.
"It ebbs and flows dramatically," Nagy said. "In countries that are more aligned with Western-style business, like England, France, Spain and Switzerland, the MBA is highly valued and there is some reward for students going on to get the MBA. Germany is mixed and not as supportive."
Although Breeden did not rule out the possibility of partnering with a school in Europe in the future as well, he did not see any new alliances on the horizon anytime soon, meaning that for the time being, all of Fuqua's efforts in Europe will be aimed at making the Frankfurt campus more attractive.
"We think we're going to pick up students from Europe," Breeden said. "We view [the Seoul partnership] as a plus for Europe-based students."
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