Lan Shili, a former billionaire who founded one of China’s first private airlines, beamed in front of the camera: “With the Oxford gown, the Oxford badge, and this library card – once you’ve got this three-piece set and you’re sitting here, don’t you kind of look like an Oxford person?”
“My Oxford life officially begins today,” he declared in a video he shared on the Weibo microblog service in September.
Nearly a year on, the executive training programme that took him to the prestigious University of Oxford – and which reportedly cost 1.08 million yuan (US$160,589) per participant – has sparked a media firestorm in China.
Some participants complained to the university, as well as the media, that the actual curriculum and experience they received fell far short of the programme’s glossy marketing pitches and called it a scam.
While such cases were rare in China’s relatively mature executive education market, experts said they underscored a persistent reality: the networking opportunities and prestige offered by the world’s top universities were still a powerful draw for the country’s business elite, especially when global expansion was a common aspiration.
Dozens of Chinese executives attended the Oxford Global CEO Programme’s modules in the United Kingdom and Germany last September, followed by sessions in Hong Kong and Singapore in December.
According to multiple Chinese media reports citing participants, they paid through a Beijing-based agency and were sold on a brochure promising in-depth discussions and visits to top-tier companies.
But at Oxford – a name synonymous with knowledge, prestige, and global vision – they ended up with short classroom time, found course discussions lacked breadth and depth, and spent much of their time waiting in line to get library cards, they complained. They said the much-hyped corporate visit to Germany turned into little more than a bus tour circling factory grounds.
After they raised objections, some participants reportedly received partial refunds.
Several executives that mainland China media identified as having been among those who attended the programme, including Lan, did not respond to interview requests.
Oxford’s press office said last week that the programme worked with external delivery partners and the university distanced itself from the agency’s promotional materials, calling them unofficial.
Despite its “Global CEO Programme” title, and the vision of cultivating “financial strategists, entrepreneurs and global industrialists” stated on its website, the programme was run by a relatively unknown university organisation – the Oxford Digital Health Institute – and headed by a professor whose expertise lay in health research.
“The brochure and videos supplied to the university [by participants who complained] do not match the information published through official university channels,” the press office said. “The university does not recognise them as authoritative descriptions of the programme and has not established their provenance.”
It did not respond to questions about the name of its local partner agency, the cost of tuition, or whether participants had received refunds.
With Chinese companies going global at a rapid clip, overseas executive education programmes are hardly a novelty for the country’s CEOs. Many domestic business schools have long-standing partnerships with elite institutions like Stanford and Harvard.
“Entrepreneurs – especially the more active ones – are no strangers to these programmes, so this case is likely an outlier,” said Tang Dajie, a senior researcher at the China Enterprise Institute think tank in Beijing.
But he added that even though younger entrepreneurs and the heirs of company founders were generally better educated than previous generations – with many starting out with MBAs – the allure of elite universities remained potent.
“They may be familiar with these programmes, but that doesn’t mean they’ve seen through the mystique – if anything, I’d say they’re even more star-struck [than the older generation],” he said.
“I’ve seen people finish at [Beijing’s] Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, then go to China Europe International Business School [in Shanghai], and then sign up for yet another one. What they’re after is the network, the prestige, the badge.”
The Oxford saga is playing out against a backdrop of heightened demand for training among Chinese business executives, who are navigating an array of new challenges.
“In the past, many people joined executive programmes for potential socialising opportunities,” said Professor Wu Fei of Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. “But now, a growing number of participants are focused on how to break through their companies’ bottlenecks.”
Unlike the previous era of breakneck growth, today’s fast-changing economic environment demanded that business leaders kept learning, he said.
Wu, who studies wealth management and has provided training to many corporations and institutions, said: “Chinese companies are now grappling with the urgent need to upgrade and transform. With intense competition at home, many are looking to go global and tap markets where rivalry is less cutthroat – these are problems they simply didn’t face before.”
There are no official statistics on the size of China’s executive education market. But training programmes for business leaders come in all shapes and sizes, and partnerships with top universities are common. High-end programmes typically include exchanges with elite academics and visits to major corporations.
For example, the China Entrepreneur Forum said in a news release that its Yabuli Growth Programme arranged for participants to tour Google, Nvidia and Stanford University during its United States module last November, with senior executives hosting the visits. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
