If it is not taught in English, then it is not an MBA. At least that is the belief of George Yip, the dean of Rotterdam School of Management.

Yip raises his eyebrows at the suggestion that a number of European deans are poised to offer electives in their native language. “I would have thought teaching in English is a complete requirement,” he says.

Yip is right – up to a point. If he is to attract the best international students, teaching in Dutch would be a nonstarter. But there is another argument. Fluency in two or more languages offers globetrotting executives a competitive advantage.

Thierry Grange, the dean of Grenoble Ecole de Management, says: “What about the 25 per cent of Americans who speak Spanish? If you want to improve your fluency as a Spanish-speaking American then Spain is a good place to do your MBA.”

Grange is set to offer electives taught in Spanish, French and German. Grenoble is not alone. IESE, the Barcelona business school, offers parallel core modules taught in Spanish. A third of the cohort for the two-year, full-time MBA – about 70 students – take the Spanish option.

Most of them are nonSpanish speakers wanting to demonstrate fluency in a major language. Javier Muñoz, IESE’s MBA admissions director, says: “Spanish is the added value we can bring students. They live in Spain for two years and Spanish is an important language in some parts of the world. It is becoming more important in America.”

The argument boils down to how you define internationalism, according to Peter Calladine, the accreditation services manager at the Association of MBAs (AMBA).

“Bologna opened up the market across Europe by standardising undergraduate and masters degrees. For the first time students were able to shop around for the best education,” he explains.

“If an Italian student wants to do an MBA in Germany, he will acquire another European language. Plus he will probably be taught in English. English students do not have that incentive to learn another language.”

AMBA, which accredits business schools across Europe and, increasingly, further afield, is finding that a large number of European business schools are teaching the MBA to part-time students in their native language.

TiasNimbas Business School in the Netherlands, for example, teaches part-time programmes in Dutch, while EADA, in Barcelona, offers an executive MBA in Spanish.

“Teaching the MBA in your native language makes sense for a home-grown market,” Calladine says.

Meanwhile, Howard Thomas, the dean of Warwick Business School and the chairman of two accrediting bodies, says: “Companies with multinational origins are looking for people who can offer more than business English. They like candidates with another European language.”

But ambition to become a world player is leading many schools to teach the MBA in English. GSIB, in Moscow, will start electives in English next year. Svetlana Koldun, the head of English-language teaching, says: “We give our MBA students 150 to 180 hours of tuition and get them up to a minimum of intermediate-level Cambridge University business English by the end of their degree.

“GSIB’s goal is, eventually, to offer an international MBA taught completely in English.”

Grenoble unveils its secret weapon to woo Americans

Thierry Grange, the dean of Grenoble Ecole de Management, wants to put his business school on the map and attract more American students.

Grange hopes his secret weapon will be a European MBA that offers electives in three European languages.

“The world is no longer Anglo-Saxon, there is a revolution going on,” he says. “Europe is the ideal place for intercultural management to be taught because you have big cultural differences between countries. German is spoken by 100 million people throughout Europe, while Spanish is spoken across Central and Latin America.”

Grenoble plans to offer a choice of language options from October. The MBA and Masters in Business (MIB) will be taught mainly in English but there will be electives in three other languages. The combination could be English, French and Spanish, or English, French and German.

Grenoble is one of France’s top six business schools and its doctor of business administration programme – recently accredited by the Association of MBAs – is taught in France, China, Lebanon, Switzerland and America, as well as in the UK; evidence of an increasing internationalism.

The school opened a recruiting office in New York a few years ago and the number of American students has risen ever since. This market is vital to Grange’s plan. Americans make up a quarter of Grenoble’s full-time MBA cohort, but he believes that offering modules taught in French, Spanish or German could attract even more.

“American students who come to Europe to study want an accredited degree that is a guarantee of quality. They want it taught in English and they want to be able to breathe another culture and possibly speak another language,” Grange says.

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