Business Education

Last month, after two busy years working as a manager at Sun Chemical by day and studying at night, 32-year-old Andrei Popov got an American MBA. His business degree is from California State University, Hayward - but he got it through a Moscow program that celebrated its 10-year anniversary last month.

The Cal State Hayward program is now one of many routes to an MBA here in Russia. Particularly since 1999, a wealth of MBA programs have sprung up with lots of choices - studying in English vs. in Russian, in the evenings vs during the day, private schools vs state-run universities, Russian degrees vs. Western degrees.

'It was a personal challenge for me to see if I could combine work and education,' said Popov, who chose the program because the classes are in the evenings and are in English. 'For me, the program was about personal as well as professional growth'.

This is a common sentiment among Moscow's MBA students. Another program that culminates in an US MBA degree is run by Moscow University Touro, which has ties to Dowling College and Touro University in New York and is one of the universities in an inter­national network that includes others in Germany and Israel. Most of the professors are Americans and even a quarter of the students are non-Russians. Classes are held in the evenings and the whole degree can be earned in one year. The price tag is pretty steep - $10,000 - but Nazy Sichinava, the coordinator of graduate programs at Touro in Moscow, says it's worth it.

'It's a great opportunity for Russian students to get an American degree,' Sichinava said. But she admits that an American degree is not always what everyone is after. While Touro has been offering MBAs since 1996 and the Cal State program has been around for a decade, the last several years have seen the emergence of many Russian MBA programs as well.

Here or Abroad?
Oleg Vikhansky, the director of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Moscow State Univer­sity, identified five reasons why students have been choosing his school since it opened in 2001 instead of going abroad to get an US or European diploma. Some students don't go because of the cost or because they don't have the language skills, he said. Others stay in Russia because they fear losing their jobs here if they take a year or two to study abroad. Many students choose an MBA in Russia because it is an oppor­tunity to make connec­tions with other Russian business­people - something even Wharton or Harvard cannot offer. Perhaps most importantly though, Vikhansky said, 'there are many peculiarities of business in Russia' that you just can't learn abroad.

Marian Dent heads the Pericles ABLE Project, a U.S. non-governmental group that gets Russians ready for top U.S. business schools She says some Russians are staying at home for pragmatic reasons. 'Because of the tighter job market in the U.S., it's not such a sure bet that MBAs will get you a job'.

Moscow State University's Vikhansky teaches two courses himself - Introduction to Management and Strategic Management - and he uses a teaching approach called 'action-reflection learning' that has Swiss and German roots. He claims his teaching method is better suited to the realities of Russian business than the rational 'case study method' that dominates US MBA programs. When he occasionally does use a case in his teaching, he picks an example from the West, business in Russia just doesn't lend itself to stripped-down models.

The American Chamber of Commerce held its Annual MBA Case Competition April 12 and Vikhansky did not even send his students. The only participants were the Cal State program, Touro, the American Institute of Business and Economics, the Classical Business School and the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute.

Dent laments the dearth of Russian programs that use the case-based approach. She said Russian professors tend to rely too heavily on lectures and do not teach valuable problem-solving and team-building skills.

Portrait of a Student
Vikhansky says an average student at his Moscow State University program is a 30-year-old man (less than one-third are women) with about eight years of work experience. Half his students have degrees in engineering. Others studied economics, management, law or the humanities during their university years.

Vikhansky says the quality of the teaching and of the students is what sets his school apart from other top Russian MBA programs. Most of the faculty actively works in business - not as consultants, but as active players - and the few professors who are full-time academics supplement their classes with frequent visits by professionals from different business fields Vikhansky tries to impress his teaching philosophy on all his professors. He tells them: 'You're not 'giving lectures' You are 'working with students'. There's a big difference'. He maintains that the program accepts only the very best students, particularly those that are working for successful companies. The school has a special partnership with Oleg Deripaska's mega-company Base Element, so it draws a lot of students from RUSAL and Deripaska's other holdings. About 40 percent of the students have their tuition paid for by their employer.

'We have very strict entrance exams and you can't just pay to get in,' he said. And once you're in, it s no cakewalk. He said there is no guarantee that you will graduate. Vikhansky doesn't dispute a caption that ran under a fearsome photograph of him in a Kompaniya magazine cover story last month. 'Oleg Vikhansky isn't afraid to flunk top managers'.

Healthy Competition
Vikhansky says that while his program is popular and gets a boost from the prestigious reputation of Moscow State University - the Moscow State 'brand' attracts students, as he puts it - there is stiff competition out there. The fashionable, quasi-state Higher School of Economics runs a popular MBA program through its Graduate School of Management. The school has the money to attract a top-notch faculty and for four consecutive years has won an award for best business teaching given by the Russian Association of Business Education. It launched an Executive MBA program in December 2002.

The Graduate School of International Business offers several well-respected MBA programs. Students can choose, for instance, to enroll in a two-year evening program, a year-and-a-half long day program, or an MBA in one year that includes both evening classes and 'distance learning'. All the programs cost a little over $2,000 per semester.

An MBA from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Moscow's International University will cost you upward of $8,000. Students can choose between specialties in finance or corporate management and can study in the evenings at this Russian-language program.

The Moscow State University of International Relations also boasts a strong MBA. Their program has ties to Vladimir Potanin's huge Interros group St Petersburg State University's MBA is one of the highest profile degrees in St Petersburg, largely because it has a partnership with the business school at University of California, Berkeley.

by Quinn Martin

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