If you’re a finance professional in Hong Kong considering spending tens of thousands of dollars on a Western MBA – and taking time out to study abroad – it’s worth knowing which US and European MBAs offer you the best chance of landing a job when you return home.
To give you a hand, we looked through our database to find Hong Kong-based CVs with MBAs from US or European business schools (people who studied at Asian campuses were excluded).
We then found the top-25 foreign MBA providers among Hong Kong candidates and converted each one into a percentage of the overall total. The results are shown in the table below.
Surprisingly, given the large number of Western universities that run MBA programmes, only seven schools dominate the table (with popularity rankings of 5% or more).
London Business School (17.4%) is in poll position by a considerable margin, reflecting its long-standing status as a breeding ground for Asian bankers (it came second in a similar table for Singapore).
INSEAD’s programme is rated the best continental European MBA by data provider QS, and it achieves the same result among Hong Kong-based finance professionals on our database (nearly 9% of those who attended a top-25 school went to INSEAD).
Columbia Business School and Chicago Booth are the leading US MBAs for getting a banking job in Hong Kong. And Hongkongers also show an overall preference for elite American schools – US institutions take up 13 of the 25 places in our table (compared with seven for the UK and just five for continental Europe).
Attending Manchester Business School is also a good bet if you want to advance your career in Hong Kong finance – it’s in fifth spot, well ahead of traditionally more illustrious British rivals, Oxford’s Said Business School and Cambridge’s Judge Business School.