The Rise of the European B-School

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About a third of MBA students at INSEAD study at the school's campus in Singapore, where ESSEC, another grande école, also has a campus.

The Bologna Accord to Change Higher Education

EM Lyon, also a French school, opened a campus last year in Shanghai and plans to send 10% of its full-time students there for an additional three months of study.

Vlerick Leuven Gent absorbed a Russian business school in St. Petersburg in 2006, and plans to launch MBA programs at China's Peking University in October. Since 2000, the Grenoble Graduate School of Business has launched part-time MBA programs in Moscow, Tbilisi, Georgia, and Chisinau, Moldova.

A potential threat to the growth of European MBA programs is the Bologna accord, in which 46 European countries have pledged to adopt an Anglo-American system of higher education by 2010 and to recognize each other's degrees more than in the past. Rather than spending as many as six years at one school to earn one degree, students will complete a bachelor's degree in three to four years and have the option to do a master's elsewhere.

Julian Birkinshaw, deputy dean of programs at London Business School, says the accord has encouraged a proliferation of masters in management programs aimed at 21-year-olds—typically students directly out of college. He fears these may cannibalize graduate MBA programs generally aimed at students with work experience. Indeed, more than two-thirds of Europe's 300 masters in management programs were created after 2005. In the same period, the number of MBA programs has grown from a handful to about 70, according to data from the Graduate Management Admissions Council.

Bright Outlook

The dean of IE Business School, Santiago Iniguez, takes a different view. The accord "could be the equivalent of what the euro meant for the economy," he says, fostering an academic fluidity among nations not seen since perhaps the 13th century, when European scholars traveled freely among universities and discoursed in Latin, the lingua franca. "Pre-experience" masters programs won't detract from the MBA market, Iniguez says, because the two degrees target two very different audiences.

While the repercussions for Europe's MBA programs remain to be seen, the current outlook is bright: Applications are up, admissions are increasingly selective, and ever more companies are demanding multilingual recruits with global polish. With the number of programs specializing in disciplines such as entrepreneurship, finance, and corporate social responsibility on the rise, Europe remains a compelling locale for MBA education. Harvard Business School, beware!

Fishbein is a reporter in BusinessWeek's Paris bureau .