The University of Maryland Smith School of Business Shanghai, China

Recently, during my trip in Shanghai, I had the opportunity to speak with Steven Feld, the Executive Director of Professional Programs and Services at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business at the Maryland Center China in Shanghai. What I found was a man with a conviction to foster the growth of a business school in China that could live up to the growing needs for talented managers and can provide people who have already succeeded at doing business in China a chance to hone their skills to a new level.

I have to admit that the interview’s beginning was little rocky. Because of a delay in my flight, I arrived at the Center, bags still in hand, about an hour and a half later than I’d planned. Fortunately, I was able to sneak into another interview and get a few shots at a question and answer. Dr. Feld was happily answering questions from a Chinese newspaper. I decided to go for the big one.

“So, how are you going to compete with Harvard? How about Duke? What have you got for the big guns?” I ask. Dr. Feld Steve Feld just grins. I know he’s been asked this question a dozen times before, and his response is fitting for a man who left Wharton to manage a program sitting on the fence between great and unbeatable.

“It’s all about service,” he said. “If you come to the University of Maryland’s EMBA program here, you get the same quality and the same teachers you’d get as if you were in the US. We don’t water down our program for China.”

And with that, I smiled, reached for my notebook, and realized I’d left it in the cab. Red-faced, I grabbed a sheet of paper from my bag and began writing furiously as Dr. Feld talked about this EMBA in China.

He also pointed out the way in which the program had been made administratively simple. “Our students have an average of 15 years of experience,” Dr. Feld pointed out, “and they are juggling families, running their companies, and completing 54 credit hours of school in 18 months. So we need to help them by making the administrative process of this course–buying books, registering for courses, receiving grades–as simple as possible.”

There were several key points that stood out as Dr. Feld talked. One was his sense of commitment: from everything he said, I could tell that the Smith School is not some kind of attempt to offer a mediocre program to a China hungry for, but an administratively simple program designed to produce the same quality of education that has given the University of Maryland its distinctive international reputation. A key point of the program is that the same professors who teach at the University of Maryland deliver the lectures and do the teaching just as they do in the US. Dr. Feld also stressed the three core competencies of the program: globalization, techonology, and innovation and entrepreneurship, which he believes will be core principles rising entrepreneurs and businesspeople need to master in the coming years of business.

Smith has some impressive ranking as well. Though it’s name is just beginning to come to China, it’s international reputation (ranked #17 in the world and #5 for its research department) is long-standing. One of the most interesting points of discussion I had with Dr. Feld was about the school’s impressive research rank. Can a school with a rank like that deliver good quality teaching, I wondered? Or would the faculty at the U of Maryland feel so much pressure to perform in research that they would neglect their teaching duties? Dr. Feld, as always, gave a delightful response. “Well, we have two ways to respond to that. First, we have research centers designed to disseminate the information from our researchers to the public and to interested parties. Second, we have a really smart dean who created a staff of teaching professors who aren’t obligated to do research. And what this has done is increase the standard of teaching at the University of Maryland, so that both the teaching staff and the research staff frequently get rated highly for their teaching.”

There is a saying China (isn’t there always?): “麻雀虽小, 五脏俱全.” Though the sparrow is small, it has all the vital organs. And though Maryland is by no means a small school in any sense of the word–its reputation and abilities place it among the best in the world–its name is only beginning to gain weight and force in China. Despite this, the programs the University of Maryland offers in China–its EMBA as well as its professional development courses–are designed with care and clever precision to deliver high-quality instruction to China’s business leaders.

A final update: interested readers can check out the Smith Business Intelligence site, a great source of useful information about the latest business information in China.