here - Rotterdam School of Management

RSM STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES
Elements of our ambition
We are a very large and complex school: over 20 different degree
programmes, 450 faculty and staff, over 7,000 students in degree
programmes and over 1,000 in non-degree programmes, a public
part and a private part, and multiple research centres and
initiatives. It is clear that one central challenge is that the whole
is less than the sum of the parts - we punch below our weight.
The other central challenge is that our reputation with the business
community, especially outside The Netherlands, is far weaker
than that with academics and potential students. So our overall
strategic objective is to enhance our overall standing, particularly
with the international business community, by improving
individual elements of the school, but even more, by getting the
different elements to work together better. For example, only a
minority of our highly talented faculty teach in our MBA and
executive education programmes. Better integration would
improve both the faculty and the programmes.
Five major elements support our ambition to become a top
global business school by 2012 (Exhibit 2). Their current positions
vary as to where they are relative to where they need to be to
support our global ambition.
Pre-experience programmes are already in a very strong
position, which arises mainly from the narrower scope of
geographic competition - no serious competition outside Europe.
For the BScBA (Dutch) programme, we are consistently the first
choice in The Netherlands. Our challenge is to find some way to
legally select for quality and to manage the volume. For the
International BScBA (English) programme, we already rank among
the top 10 in Europe. The overall MSc is usually ranked 8th or 9th
by the FT. Indeed, probably the biggest challenge is to deal with
external competition while avoiding internal competition between
our MSc and MBA programmes.
MBA programmes, especially the full-time, are the reputational
flagship of any business school. We need to move from rankings
10 RSM OUTLOOK SUMMER 2009
Exhibit 2. Major elements of our ambition
“Our overall objective is to enhance our standing by improving
individual elements of the school, but even more, by getting
those elements to work better together.”
in the lower end of the European top 10 to the top five and in the
global rankings from the lower 20s into the top 20. The main
challenge is to increase the quality of the students and of the
recruiters, which form a virtuous circle between them. Our
strategies include reducing the age and increasing the GMAT
scores of the students and to bring in more recruiters. Our special