Sharleen Kikunze’s first thought when considering an MBA three years ago was to study in the US. She was working in her home city of Nairobi for Endeavor, a New York-based organisation supporting high-impact entrepreneurship, which had close partnerships with the business schools of Harvard and Stanford universities.
Kikunze (pictured above) compiled a shortlist of target institutions: Stanford in California, Columbia Business School in New York and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. But when she came to apply in 2020, she realised the US was not for her, for one reason: the prohibitively expensive tuition fees.
Instead she is applying to the University of Oxford’s Sa?d Business School and Warwick Business School in the UK, where the courses take one year to complete instead of two in the US, and the respective fees of ￡63,000 ($84,000) and ￡43,935 ($58,500) for their 2021 intakes mean the UK courses are less than half the cost of her original US targets.