Eduniversal

Eduniversal is a French consulting company and a rating agency specialized in Higher Education. Founded in 1994, one of the main goals of Eduniversal is to provide a tool, for students all around the world, which provides information on the best Business Schools, located in the 5 continents.

Every year, the company publishes an official selection of the best 1000 Business Schools in more than 150 countries in the world. The purpose of this selection is to offer students a serious referent that reflects the international dimension of each School and therefore enables them to make the right decision regarding the choice of their future School.

The official selection is the result of the work of an International Scientific Committee gathered at the initiative of the Eduniversal Company. The International Scientific Committee is composed from 12 members; 9 members coming from nine different geographic zones (Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Eurasia and Middle-East, Far Eastern Asia, Latin America, North America, Oceania and Western Europe), 1 representative of the Academic Council of the United Nations System (ACUNS) and 2 members of the Eduniversal Company (The CEO and the International Coordinator.

It is interesting to note that, while the company is known as Eduniversal all around the world, in France it is known as SMBG.

The Official Selection of the best 1000 Business Schools

The official selection as it is defined by the Eduniversal Company is the classification of the 1000 best Business Schools in 153 countries in the World. The selection is classified in terms of Palms and Ratings, issued from the Deans’ votes. The aim of this official selection is to provide sufficient information for students about a range of academic institutions, sorted by their reputations and international ambitions and located in 9 different zones.

Methodology

Official Selection

The Official Selection is a selection of Business Schools made by a Scientific Committee that has established a global mapping system meeting the criteria of universality and the international reputation of each academic institution.

EDUNIVERSAL offers to describe the best academic opportunities for students zone by zone, via a range of schools with different types of reputation and international ambitions, within the nine zones listed below: - Africa - North America - Latin America - Central Asia - Eurasia and the Middle East - Eastern Europe - Western Europe - the Far East - Oceania

According to the Eduniversal company, the international reputation is the capacity of a Business School to increase the prestige of a student – and therefore improve his employment prospects – in his country of study and internationally.

In order to execute the official selection, each country and each continent is represented according to a quota method. The number of schools per country is therefore weighted by quantitative and qualitative criteria.

• The quantitative criteria :

- the national expenditure on education per inhabitant; - the GDP; - the size of the population; - the number of students in higher education

• The qualitative criterion :

the educational environment in the country (established, among other things, according to the number of secondary education academic institutions in the country, as well as a historical importance of the national educational tradition). The results can therefore be expressed in the following way:

Country	National Expenditure on Education per inhabitant	GDP per habitant	Population size in Millions	No. of students in Higher Education	Qualitative Criterion	Schools Quota Results
Tunisia	$ 605.10	$ 8,898	9 815 644	26 435	-	4 Schools
Poland	$ 773.80	$ 14,880	38 625 478	447 785	-	12 Schools
Indonesia	$ 64.80	$ 4,323	245 452 739	552 660	-	7 Schools
Mexico	$ 495	$ 11,249	107 449 525	339 450	-	17 Schools
Netherlands	$ 1683.70	3,5078	16 318 199	89 341	-	13 Schools

The official selection is made by the International Scientific Committee composed of 9 members coming from the nine geographic zones listed above.

The 9 expert members are all originate from the academic world, and they are have got the experience and are well-known references in their zone.

The International Scientific Committee meets:

• to modify the Official Selection, two years after the first Selection, then every four years, depending on changes and global trends
• yearly, to publish the Palms arising from international criteria and the votes of the Deans on the website: www.eduniversal.net

The Palms

The EDUNIVERSAL Palms indicate the level of an academic institution's international reputation. They are awarded on the basis of the research work carried out by the International Scientific Committee, which compiles the list of criteria, together with the assessments made by peers: The Deans' vote

They help the student to make his choice within the Official Selection and rate the reputation of the school or university within the country, its geographical zone, or even at the global level.

The Palms are divided into a league system, which allows horizontal intercontinental comparison, different from the vertical comparison made by most of the international classification systems.

This segmentation is presented as a normal probability curve: • 100 schools in the 5 Palm league • 200 schools in the 4 Palm league • 400 schools in the 3 Palm league • 200 schools in the 2 Palm league • 100 schools in the 1 Palm league

The classification by Palms is made using two essential elements: the internationalisation criteria and the Deans' vote. The Internalisation criteria :

• the accreditations obtained by the schools (AACSB, EQUIS, AMBA, State Qualification, etc.);
• the main classifications (Financial Times, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Business Week, Asiaweek, Wall Street Journal, America savings, THES, SMBG, etc.);
• participation in international academic associations (EFMD, CLADEA, CEEMAN, EMBA, AAPBS, etc.);
• the network of partners of Deans and Business Schools at the international and local levels
• reputed studies and sites in the world of education and universities

The Deans' vote :

Each Dean from the universities and schools on the list of 1,000 can vote to recommend the other academic institutions. This vote is converted into a recommendation rate that the student can use to evaluate each academic institution and compare them.

These recommendations give another reply to the question: "Out of the following schools, which ones would you most recommend to a person who wants to study in this country? ".