Business & Management
By Neda Mostafavi
Published: 15 August 2004
What do you come out with? BA or BSc. Or at Lancaster a BBA (Bachelor of Business Administration).
Why do it? Because it will make you employable and it might help you get rich quick.
What's it about? You learn all you need to know to become a manager. If you do the BSc in management sciences at Warwick, you get a taste of economics, accounting and finance, industrial relations, organisational behaviour, marketing, information systems and law. Bath's BSc in business administration is similar - but you have more choice. And, because it's a thin-sandwich degree, you have two six-month sessions in industry earning good money to help pay off student loans. The business studies BA at Kingston is also a sandwich course, and gives you a year out in industry. Lancaster runs a BBA and a BSc in business studies. City (Cass) also runs a BSc in Business Studies.
How long is a degree? Three or four years.
What are the students like? Thatcher's grandchildren. Sharp, ambitious, focused. Some are very sure what they want to do and how much they want to earn. Kingston has a high ethnic minority population. Thirty per cent of students at Warwick, and 23 per cent at City come from overseas.
How is it packaged? At City, the ratio of exams to coursework is 80:20; at Bath and Lancaster it's 50:50. More than 50 per cent is examined at Warwick.
How cool is it? Depends how you define cool. If you mean popular, it's the coolest subject in our universities. A quarter of English students are studying it.
What A-levels do you need? Anything goes at City, Lancaster and Kingston, though Kingston is not keen on General Studies or Art A-level. City isn't keen on General Studies either. Bath and Warwick favour a mix of quantitative and arts A-levels.
What grades? AAA at Bath; AAB at Warwick; ABB at City; BBB at Lancaster; 220 points/CCD at Kingston.
Will it keep you off the dole? That's the idea. Students studying finance and accounting go into (you guessed) finance and accounting; students of business studies get graduate traineeships at blue-chip companies or find jobs in management consulting. All business schools have students entering the likes of Accenture, Proctor and Gamble, Unilever, BT, and JP Morgan.
Will you be interviewed? Not at Kingston, Warwick, Lancaster or City. Only in exceptional circumstances at Bath.
What do students say? Jessica Worley, who studied business administration at Bath. "I liked the fact that the course is a thin-sandwich, so we could work in two organisations. I worked in Richmond, Virginia."
Where's best for teaching? Bath, City, Cranfield, De Montfort, Imperial, Kingston, London Business School (postgraduate), Lancaster, Loughborough, Open, Northumbria, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Surrey, UWE and Warwick all received excellents. Aston, Leeds Metropolitan, LSE, Manchester, Oxford Brookes and Ulster scored 24 out of 24. Glamorgan was rated excellent. Edinburgh, St.Andrews and the UHI Millenium Institute have all been rated excellent.
Where's best for research? Warwick and Lancaster scored a 5*. Bath, LSE, Reading, Aston, Cambridge, City, Imperial, Leeds, Manchester, UMIST, Nottingham, Oxford and Cardiff scored 5. Birkbeck, Birmingham, Bradford, Brunel, Cranfield, Exeter, Hull, Keele, King's, Loughborough, Luton, Portsmouth, Royal Holloway, Surrey, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, Stirling, Strathclyde and Queen's Belfast scored 4.
Where's the cutting edge? You can become immersed in supply chain management and strategic human resource management at Bath. Similarly supply chain management at City, as well as pensions management. Small businesses started by the over-50s at Kingston.
Who are the stars? Professor John Purcell at Bath on strategic human resource management; Robert Blackburn, head of the small business research unit at Kingston; Professor Lord David Currie at City, recently elected chairman of OFCOM (Office of Communications); Professor Michael West at Aston on organizational psychology...
Related courses: BSc in marketing, BAs in accounting and finance, and organisational studies at Lancaster; BSc in business information technology and BAs in business management and business administration at Kingston; accounting and finance, and international business at Warwick.
Added value: You can do a BA in advertising and marketing at Lancaster. You get the chance to spend time in America or Europe as part of a Bath four-year degree and you can take wacky electives in "emerging patterns of thought and belief". At Kingston, everyone can do a sandwich year. City is particularly hot on e-commerce and have also recently set up a Professional Placement scheme with KPMG with three two-month long placements in years 2, 3 and 4.
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