A Case Study: Economics & Business Programs
Part I
When economics students returned one winter to the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris, copies of a simple one-page petition were posted in the corridors demanding an unlikely privilege: French as a teaching language.
“We understand that economics is a discipline, like most scientific fields, where the research is published in English,” the petition read, in apologetic tones. But it declared that it was unacceptable for a native French professor to teach standard courses to French-speaking students in the adopted tongue of English.
In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming commonplace. In the last ten years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue in order to raise revenues by attracting more international students and as a way to respond to globalization.
Business universities are leading the trend, partly because changes in international accreditation standards in the late 1990s required them to include English-language components. But English is also spreading to the undergraduate level, with some South Korean universities offering up to 30 percent of their courses in the language. A former president of Korea University in Seoul sought to raise that share to 60 percent, but he was not re-elected.
In Madrid, business students can take their admissions test in English for the elite Instituto de Empresa and enroll in core courses for a master’s degree in business administration in the same language. The Lille School of Management in France stopped considering English a foreign language in 1999, and now half the postgraduate programs are taught in English to accommodate a rising number of international students.
Over the last three years, the number of master’s programs offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, to 3,300 programs at 1,700 universities, according to David A. Wilson, chief executive of the Graduate Management Admission Council, an international organization of leading business schools that is based in McLean, Virginia.
“We are shifting to English. Why?” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of M.B.A. programs at Essec, a top French business school in a suburb of Paris. “It’s the language for international teaching,” he said. “English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.”
Part II
Essec has also taken advantage of the increased revenue that foreign students — English-speaking ones — can bring in. Its population of foreign students jumped by 38 percent in four years.
The tuition for a two-year master’s degree in business administration is 19,800 euros for European Union citizens, and 34,000 euros for non-EU citizens.
With the jump in foreign students, Essec now offers 25 percent of its 200 courses in English. Its ambition is to accelerate the English offerings to 50 percent.
Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, dean of the Instituto de Empresa, argues that the trend is a natural consequence of globalization, with English functioning as Latin did in the 13th century as the lingua franca most used by universities.
“English is being adapted as a working language, but it’s not Oxford English,” he said. “It’s a language that most stakeholders speak.” But getting students to feel comfortable speaking English in the classroom is easier said than done. When younger French students at Essec start a required course in organizational analysis, the atmosphere is marked by long, uncomfortable silences, said Alan Jenkins, a management professor and academic director of the executive M.B.A. program.
“They are very good on written tasks, but there’s a lot of reticence on oral communication and talking with the teacher,” Dr. Jenkins said, adding that he used role-playing to encourage students to speak. He also refuses to speak in French. “I have to force myself to say, ‘Can you give me that in English?’ ”
Officials at Ewha Womans University in Seoul are also aware that they face a difficult task with their Global project, which require new students to take four classes in English, two under the tutelage of native English-speaking professors. The 120-year-old university embarked on a hiring spree to attract 50 foreign professors.
At the beginning, “teaching courses in English may have less efficiency or effectiveness in terms of knowledge transfer than those courses taught in Korean,” said Anna Suh, program manager for the university’s office of global affairs, who said that students eventually see the benefits. “Our aim for this kind of program is to prepare and equip our students to be global leaders in this new era of internationalization.”
“Internationally, the competition is everywhere,” Dr. Bredillet of the Lille management school said. “For a master’s in management, I’m competing with American universities. I’m competing with programs in Germany, Norway and the U.K. That’s why we’re delivering the curriculum in English.”
English as Language of Global Education. Retrieved from the New York Times.