Shortly after a fire drill on a recent morning, as a few hundred students, staff and faculty made their way back into ESCP Business School in Paris, Léon Laulusa stepped into a crowded elevator with three excited undergrads.
Laulusa asked them where they were from, and each answered in turn, happy to be taking a ride, no matter how short, with ESCP’s executive president and dean. One of the undergrads was from Russia. Another from Iran. The third was both French and Romanian.
The brief interaction was more than an anecdote scribbled in a reporter’s notebook. It highlighted a core thread of the school’s identity.
“Two-thirds of our students are international, and one-third are French. This is part of our DNA,” Laulusa told Poets&Quants during a visit to the school last month. “With globalization, you need to know how to move between cultures and work with different nationalities. I call this the ‘multiculturalism approach,’ and that’s one of the key things students learn at ESCP.”
STUDENTS COME FROM 140 COUNTRIES
Each year, students from nearly 140 different countries are enrolled across ESCP’s six campuses – each located in one of Europe’s key economic centers: Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin, Warsaw, and Turin. (It also has a new branch campus in Dubai, United Arab Emirates which we’ll talk about a little later.)
This unique multi-campus structure not only allows students to study in different countries, it requires it. Students in its three-year bachelor in management study in three separate countries. Its Master in Management gives students the choice to study at between two and five of its campuses. And, for its MBA in International Management, students take each period at a different campus. That could mean up to three different countries depending on if students enroll in the 10-month or 22-month program.
“Each of our campuses is locally recognized, meaning we can award local degrees. For example, in France, we provide French degrees recognized by the Ministry of Higher Education. In Germany, we are a German university, and we can grant degrees from bachelor’s to PhD,” Laulusa tells P&Q.
This is significant for international students because the local degree allows them to work in that country without needing sponsorship from an employer. In September, ESCP became the first school outside of the United Kingdom to be able to grant British degrees.
“This is unique. No other business school in the world can do this outside the UK,” Laulusa says. “Now, if you spend a semester in London on our ESCP campus, you can also get our British degree.”
THE WORLD’S OLDEST BUSINESS SCHOOL?
ESCP is one of France’s grande école business schools, an elite category of French universities known for their high selectivity, subject area expertise, and pathways to top-level careers.
Beyond its six European campuses, partners with more than 100 global universities, many offering dual degrees. Its Dubai branch campus offers an MSc in Big Data and Business Analytics. Last month, it graduated its first cohort of 220 Emirati students. Both that campus and the program were recently accredited by UAE agencies, making it ESCP’s first dual accreditation outside of Europe.
While University of Pennsylvania’s The Wharton School has long claimed to be the “World’s First Business School” – as proclaimed on its official About Wharton webpage – ESCP may have them beat by six decades, depending on who you ask.
Wharton was founded in 1881, ESCP in 1819. But, ESCP wasn’t recognized as an official institution of higher learning in France until 1869, and Wharton often uses the distinction that it is the first “collegiate” business school operating under a university umbrella.
Whatever definition you prefer, ESCP has been teaching business for more than two centuries. Today, it enrolls more than 10,000 undergrads, graduate students, and executives in multiple programs and degrees. Its flagship Master in Management program tied for sixth in the world this year in the Financial Times ranking, and FT ranked its International MBA the 25th best in the world, including the eighth best in Europe.
In June, ESCP London Campus was shortlisted for the Times Higher Education’s Business School of the Year Award. It also recently announced a €300 million investment in a massive expansion plan that will touch most of its campuses.
During our campus visit in September, P&Q got that chance to sit down with executive president and dean Léon Laulusa. He is longtime ESCP professor and administrator, and was appointed to the deanship in June 2023. Our conversation, presented below, has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s begin with your professional background and your journey to becoming the dean at ESCP Business School.
I’ve spent more than a quarter century at ESCP; next February will be 26 years.
I am a French chartered accountant, and I started my career at Deloitte. In parallel, I began teaching at HEC Paris in 1996 because my PhD supervisor was a professor there. He encouraged me to start teaching, even though I never thought I would become a professor, let alone a dean.
By 1999, ESCP invited me to become a part-time lecturer, even though I was still working in management at other companies. Initially, I taught 30 hours, but that quickly grew to 150 hours – basically the workload of a full-time professor. I became a permanent lecturer in 2005.
At the time, it took four years to get tenure; now it takes five. In 2009, I received tenure and resigned from Deloitte. At the time, I was a partner at Deloitte, managing accounting, audit, consulting, and legal. My remuneration dropped by about 3.5 times when I became an assistant professor, which left a lot of people wondering, “What happened to you?” But I explained that I liked to educate people. For me, it’s a noble cause, and I wanted a change. It wasn’t about the money.
In 2009, the ESCP dean asked me to help develop relationships with China, and in 2014, he asked me to join the executive committee as the International Dean. By 2017, I was also asked to become the Academic Dean, overseeing both international relations and academics. Eventually, I became Deputy Dean, then Executive Dean, and now I serve as Dean.
Do you get back into the classroom much anymore?
I still teach a small class because I need that contact, even though it’s usually forbidden for school managers to lecture. But for me, it’s important because I want to stay connected with the students. I want to share my experience, but also learn from them.
NEXT PAGE: Dean Laulusa’s big vision for the future