CEIBS Part 2

This is a series of posts highlighting the experiences of students and alumni from CEIBS. If you missed Part 1, it’s here.

CEIBS’ motto is “China Depth, Global Breadth”. The idea being that all students get a deep understanding of China in a global context. Sounds good. Yet, international students often question whether they themselves are the global breadth for their Chinese classmates’ MBA experience. This is because the experience of international students is vastly different to that of the Chinese students.

Now, before I continue, I don’t want this series to seem like I’m complaining about not having privileges I’m used to in my own country. The point I’m trying to make is that students at any school should be treated equally, given that we all pay the same tuition fees (excluding scholarships). If there’s a stark difference in the service received by the domestic students and the international students as a whole, then the school has a problem. That should be true for any business school anywhere in the world. If you don’t like/believe some of the comments I’m making, I encourage you to reach out to CEIBS students and alumni to see if what I’m saying is accurate.

Desperate to be seen as diverse

Part of the issue is that the international students (especially those who aren’t ethnically Chinese) are used heavily in CEIBS’ marketing to portray an image of an internationally-diverse campus. For example, here are the Poets & Quants Meet The Class articles for the MBA 2017 and 2021 cohorts (the school didn’t do this marketing for the three cohorts in between). Each one profiles a group of students from the cohort, with only three of the ten students from the MBA 2017 article and four of the twelve students from the MBA 2021 article being Chinese students.

Side note, the Meet The CEIBS Class 2021 article has damning comment at the bottom, which the school’s dean felt the need to respond to. You can see similarities made there with the issues I am raising in this series.

If it was a random sample of students, this would make the CEIBS cohort seem incredibly diverse (a class of 67%-70% international students seems really attractive). However, it’s the complete opposite. On average, there are 180 students in the cohort, and the 2/3 Chinese, 1/3 foreign breakdown (as discussed in Part 1) implies there are 60 foreign students in each cohort. Around twenty of them are native Chinese speakers, meaning each cohort has 140 native Chinese speakers and 40 non-Chinese speakers. This gives a significantly different view on the cohort’s diversity compared to what CEIBS promotes in its marketing. Furthermore, the CEIBS website uses photos that consistently imply far greater diversity than reality. Obviously, CEIBS isn’t unique in doing this, but any applicant should be well aware of what to expect in terms of cohort diversity. In fact, I don’t have a big problem with schools exaggerating how diverse their cohort is, but CEIBS actively portrays the opposite to its reality: indicating high levels of diversity when there’s really very little diversity at all. Exaggeration and deceit are two different things.

Problems with the lack of diversity

The cohort of 180 students is split into three sections of 60 students for the core classes. Using the 140/40 breakdown discussed earlier, that means the sections will typically have around 47 native Chinese speakers and 13 non-Chinese speakers. Furthermore, group work is typically done in groups of five people from the section, which you’re assigned to instead of allowed to form by yourself. Because of the breakdown of the student backgrounds, groups almost always have four Chinese students and a foreign student, or three Chinese students and two foreign students, one of whom is a native Chinese speaker. A common problem with this structure is that group discussions begin in English, but often quickly turn to Chinese, leaving the international student lost and relegated to the role of spellchecker. It’s frustratingly common.

Problems within groups are not unusual, and have had pretty serious consequences. During term 1 (August-October), a small misunderstanding about an internal group deadline between a European student and his four Chinese group members led to the European being banned from the exchange semester bidding process until everyone else had been assigned their exchange school. Within weeks of starting the MBA, gone was the opportunity to do an exchange at Wharton, INSEAD or LBS, and all that was left were the schools no one else wanted.

Can someone translate what the professor said?

Then we have the professors. I’ll talk about the quality of teaching in a later part of this series, but a problem with some is that they don’t speak English well enough to teach an English-language MBA class. For example, there’s an elective called Industry and Competitive Analysis taught by Zhang Yu, one called Strategizing In Digital China taught by Guo Bai, and Blockchain Business Applications taught by the visiting professor Hubert Pun. They regularly resort to explaining difficult concepts in Chinese during class, then move on to the next topic without seeking an English translation. Other professors have parts of their PPT slides in Chinese because they can’t be bothered to edit it from when they taught a Chinese language class. The ability to teach a class in English should be a prerequisite for any professor at an English-language MBA program.

Then there is Prof Bin Xu who teaches the core macroeconomics class. He was formerly pretty high up as a government economist – so his knowledge of macroeconomics from a Chinese perspective is very good – but his accent is so strong that the majority of what he says is unintelligible, and also resorts to explaining difficult concepts in Chinese.

To add to that, all students have to attend a minimum number of one-off lectures called the China Discovery Series. The name is far more interesting than it actually is. They are all taught in Chinese and are used as a way for professors to talk about their latest academic research, which is often completely irrelevant to the MBA. The classes I took were a total waste of time, and I was told the 2021 cohort’s China Discovery Series were mostly propaganda sessions, talking about how the Covid-19 pandemic shows the success of the communist political system and the problems with liberal democracies.

We won't help, but we will imply we did

Finally, the quality of the careers service at the school is appalling. Much like with teaching quality, the careers service at CEIBS is such a huge problem that it deserves its own post, so I won’t go into too much detail here to avoid repeating myself later. However, it’s worth noting that the careers service is almost entirely focused on helping native Chinese speakers get jobs in China. If you don’t meet either of those two criteria, then you’ll have no support from the school.

Nevertheless, the school actively promotes that its students get jobs all around the world, in an attempt to show CEIBS’ global breadth and international reputation in its marketing documents for applicants. However, it’s important to understand that the vast majority of jobs international students get outside of China are sourced by the students themselves, with no help from the school, and these students typically return to their own country despite going to CEIBS to work in China. Why would an Indian, a European or an American leave their home country to do their MBA at CEIBS and return to their home country to work when there are good schools in their home country focused on the domestic market?

These points all raise the question about why CEIBS works so hard to attract foreign students, given that the MBA program itself isn’t designed for foreign students. What, or who, is the Global Breadth in the CEIBS motto?

The next part of this series will discuss the quality of the classroom experience.