Education In The Us ?

Q: I am in a dilemma. I am Danish and currently studying International Business Administration (bachelor level) in Denmark. Since I am very big on the international aspect I have thought about taking a business masters in the US. My biggest problem is that I am, after having looked into several business programs (both grad and undergrad), starting to get the picture that taking an education in the US is a step down from one in Europe unless you go for the top notch schools. I see several programs going through simple accounting problems with income and cash flow statements together with simple finance ratios on graduate level! Furthermore lots of undergrad studies don't have classes like micro and macro economics together with statistics. All these are crucial for developing understanding. But since these classes aren't mandatory, graduate schools cannot count on the students having these skills when attending hence a lower level. I get the feeling that a lot of business masters in the US are baloons of hot air. Has anybody got some knowlegde on differences between the american and the european system?

A:Where do I start? Since the American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber awakened Europe in the late 60s, Europe has overcompensated with business-econ programs proliferating. Sure doesn't seemed to have helped Europe's economy much. Only small pockets of the EU (northern Italy, Czech Republic, Barcelona, etc.) learning the lessons of capitalism and U.S. management style. Europe hasn't imploded the way Japan has, but its expectations of attaining parity with the U.S. have stalled because they refuse to end protectionism, social classes, and socialist institutions. Free trade within Europe doesn't help much if there is not free trade outside the continent. Instead, the U.S., Far East, and rest of the world can ignore Europe and there ain't much you folks can do about it. Your analysis of graduate business education in the U.S. is correct superficially, but it is more complicated than that. Our business ed boom started in the mid-70s. You can tell a good liberal arts college or university by its absence of business majors (though Penn, Bucknell, Notre Dame, USC and a few other highly-selective places may debate the point with not great enthusiam), because the liberal arts mantra is that business is a professional, graduate-level program that only has meaning once a student has a real college liberal arts degree (or else an engineering degree) plus two or more years of broad but intense business world experience. You are especially correct about most of our 800+ MBA programs. Most are not AACSB accredited and have MBA's (and non-business academics or businessperson adjuncts) teaching MBA's. Little quantitative background is required to get in and only low-level analysis takes place during. These are cash cows for colleges and universities to cross subsidize other programs (one of the exceptions to the rule that undergrads subsidize grads).

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