“It’s distorted reality,” he told the Australian paper. “You have to play up the full-time MBA, even though for most business schools – and certainly for the Australian business schools I know - it’s a small part of the operation. Business schools are doing the full-time MBA mostly for the halo effect of the ranking.”

In reality though, executive and part-time MBA offers play a much more dominant role in most schools as not many big banks or consulting firms send their young employees to business school as part of their career progression any more. According to Garrett the big numbers in full-time MBA students are limited to the high-ranked institutions only, naming his own school Wharton and Harvard Business School as examples. Both still have more than 1.000 full-time MBA students whilst these numbers fall by half amongst the next ten schools and halved again after that.

Before taking over as dean at Wharton Professor Garrett studied at the Australian National University in Canberra and then headed to the US as a Fulbright scholar with stints at the University of Southern California, UCLA, Yale, Stanford and Wharton for example. He founded the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and also headed the business schools at Sydney and UNSW. Whilst his career focus is in the US now, he believes strongly that his home country’s strength lies in its being “Asia savvy”, which is proven by the “visible over-representation” of Australians in places such as Hong Kong and in multinationals all around the planet according to Garrett.

Read more atThe Australian