• Academically we’re rather good. We are a mid-sized school with quite an international faculty (consisting of 65 professors in Business and Economics). In addition we produce an impressive amount of research, see international credentials. Belgium is rated top-3 in terms of education quality (World Economic Forum, 2005), and within Belgium the Faculty of Economics and Business Studies was rated top (A) quality by the international assessment committee, and the staff as unambiguously the best of the seven schools that were assessed (Teaching assessment 2005).
• We are part of a large university, where students can choose just about any curriculum that exists, ranging from philosophy, physics to Chinese.  This allows for meeting all kinds of students with all kinds of knowledge/interests.
• So we essentially offer our Master programmes because we like it. If we do attract graduate students the main reason is that we enjoy teaching at a high level, not that we need the money.

The case method surely has a respectable tradition in business education. Under a pure case approach, however, students may end up with a rather fragmented view of the world. At the other extreme, one could root all business courses in orthodox economic analysis, the simplified framework where all investment, trading, consumption and production is carried out by incredibly well informed and rational agents. The risk here is that it may provide a deceptively stylized picture of reality, too logical and coherent to be true. The optimum must be in the middle: even Harvard has embraced analytics for decades now, and Chicago the case method.

If we stray from the middle, we probably lean more towards the economic-analysis route. This is not an MBA programme; and in the fields where we are active—mainly finance and international business economics — a coherent conceptual framework is vital. Such a coherent view is hard to obtain after graduation: once you’ve left school, there will be no time and energy left for digesting economic fundamentals. This is why the analytical approach is at the core of our Master’s programme and why in the Financial & Actuarial Engineering curriculum we cooperate with our friends from the Faculty of Sciences.

• There is, of course, more than analytics and numbers: we also bring in case work during the programme, guest speakers from the business community, and field visits to companies or regulators. Together with the real-life experience that comes after graduation, these contacts with the private industry provide the caveats, question marks and qualifications that should always complement a conceptual framework. Thus, with our priorities you will end up with a coherent logical view into which your real-life annotations can be fitted, rather than with just a motley collection of unconnected stories, scraps of voodoo economics, rules of thumb, and undigested formulas.
• Also we take on board professors from other faculties, like Law or Political Science, and offer electives in those and other fields. You can even take a course from any graduate programme at K.U.Leuven, like Artificial Intelligence or Water Purification, if it fits your needs.
• Lastly, we also offer training at skills like presentations, negotiations, written and spoken English (when necessary), CV writing, and job interviews. These are not our core business but remain quite important for our graduates.

In 1998, KU Leuven has transferred its MBA programmes to a separate school, co-sponsored with Gent University. This Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School has its Leuven campus across the street and shares some facilities and teachers with KU Leuven's Leuven School of Business and Economics.

• International Office: http://www.kuleuven.ac.be/english/admission/index.htm
• Living in Leuven: http://www.kuleuven.ac.be/english/living/index.htm