Educationalists argue that learning is more effectively achieved in stimulating environments. And there is no more stimulating environment than the Global Executive Program, which Thailand’s Sasin School of Management will be running this August.
Participants travel by private boat to Sala Bang Pa-in, a 24-bedroom island retreat in Ayutthaya, the former capital of Siam, 50 minutes north of Bangkok. The classrooms offer panoramic views, and classes will be taught by visiting professors from Harvard’s School of Business and leaders of the 2018 rescue effort for a boy from the flooded Tham Luang caves. Evening seminars are held outside around a fire pit.
This level of luxury accommodation is becoming a requirement for more and more business schools. This includes many business schools featured in the FT’s Executive Education Schools rankings, which face global competition for executive education students.
“There is an arms race for business education facilities,” says Graham Miller, dean of the Rodrigo Guimarães and professor of sustainable business at the Nova School of Business and Economics in Portugal. “This business model is potentially attractive to a variety of partners, whether it is a hotel group or a company seeking naming rights for a university building.”
Investments like this aren’t cheap. Oxford University’s Said Business School is in the process of converting the city’s Victorian-era Osney power station on the banks of the River Thames into a 121-bedroom “boutique” executive education centre. He needed to raise £60m to get the project off the ground.
Eleanor Murray, Saïd’s associate dean for executive education and senior fellow in management practice, said the venue, which replaced a 1960s out-of-town education center, was an opportunity to bring executive education students closer to the Oxbridge experience. .
The building will combine Industrial Revolution-era architecture with cutting-edge technology, including four purpose-built classrooms. Participants will participate in “official events” at the cafeteria. This is an Oxbridge tradition that aims to bring together and network students from different academic disciplines.
“We consider ourselves to be in an international market and are constantly reviewing our facilities compared to those of other schools,” Murray says. “Increasingly, our clients are [executive education] We have our own facilities.”
Last year, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business made a similar move. The company has opened a 199-room boutique hotel called The Forum on the site of a 50-year-old dormitory-style building on its Arlington campus. The new complex includes two restaurants, 22,000 square feet of meeting space, and a botanical garden with more than 10,000 exotic trees and shrubs.
This conversion of an old lot next to a drainage ditch was made possible by a record $68 million gift from 1964 alumnus Frank Sands and funding from the university.
While students can learn without leaving the hotel, The Forum is located 200 meters from Darden’s main teaching building, which is also used for executive education classes.
This forum is operated under contract with International Hotel Group (IHG), which operates as a commercial company. This means that the rooms are reserved for executive education students, but the general public can also stay.
As Darden Dean Scott Beardsley explains, in its first year of operation, profits are funneled into the school to fund scholarships and new faculty appointments.
“The most important part of this project is that it enhanced our learning experience,” Beardsley says. For him, profitability is “the cherry on the cake.”
“Business schools aren’t in the hotel business, they’re in the education business. . . . They need to do it right,” Beardsley said, adding that older accommodations are a poor choice for those expecting a premium experience. “It wasn’t ideal,” he added.
“Students love coming here, but so do many recruiters who use this facility for events to recruit students on behalf of their clients,” Beardsley points out. He said up to 1,000 people could use the building at a time, either as guests or for on-site learning.
Inova Mount Vernon Hospital President Roberta Tinch recently spent time at The Forum during Darden’s four-week executive program. “We’re senior executives and we’re investing a lot of time and money. . . . So it’s great to be able to walk into that space and feel comfortable and have a great experience,” she says. “I contracted the coronavirus and had to isolate in my room, but everything was there to continue my studies. The forum was day and night, similar to what Darden had held previously. is different.”
Beardsley said he looked to what other U.S. universities have done in preparing the Darden Hotel project, particularly facilities at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California and the University of Pennsylvania.
“The idea was to build community and bring people together,” he says. “As we come out of the coronavirus pandemic, we knew people needed to see each other. This is a beautiful facility that serves a purpose. It’s not a business project, but it’s not a stupid business thing to do either.”
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Darden is not the only school to outsource executive training accommodations to hotel chains. When Britain’s Alliance Manchester Business School rebuilt its campus four years ago, it attached his 19-story hotel to its executive education center and handed its management contract to Hyatt Hotel Group.
Nevertheless, there can be reputational risks when third parties manage student accommodation, warns Andrew Crisp, co-founder of education research business Carrington Crisp. “It has to operate to the standards that students expect from the school brand,” he says.
But if it does, it could prove to be very cost-effective, he suggests. “Prices for these types of luxury buildings are not cheap, but owning a hotel means that much of the money students spend on their courses comes back to the business school, so the final It’s a good business decision.”
