ESADE Business School

Age: 53

History: Founded in 1958, ESADE is one of the most prestigious business schools in Europe. Its MBA was one of the first two-year programmes in Europe.

Address: Three buildings in a fashionable part of sunny Barcelona, and the school has great facilities in Madrid and Argentina too. A new Barcelona campus and innovation centre, Creapolis also opened last year and is home to the undergraduate degree in business, as well as the popular international MSc programmes.

Ambience: A strong international atmosphere, with 87 per cent of students on the full-time MBA programme coming from outside Spain.

Vital statistics: Triple-accredited by AMBA, EQUIS and AACSB. The ESADE alumni association ensures close links with businesses, and its international advisory board is manned by presidents of multinational companies. The careers service handles requests for graduates from more than 3,000 organisations in over 50 countries.

Added value: This year ESADE launched a new-flexible MBA (with a choice programmes lasting 12, 15 or 18 months). Foreign students can use the school's Executive Language Centre to learn Spanish (not compulsory – the MBA is taught in English). Students also have the opportunity to take Mandarin and Arabic.

Easy to get into? You need a degree, a good GMAT score and a minimum of three years' experience for the MBA.

Glittering alumni: Enrique Lores, vice-president, Hewlett Packard; Artur Carulla, CEO, Agrolimen; Jordi Hereu, Mayor of Barcelona; Jaime Guardiola, director general, Banco Sabadell; Javier Nieto, president, Santa & Cole; Ferran Soriano, vice-president of FC Barcelona.

Gurus: Professors Josep M. Lozano, social responsibility; Alex Rovira and Lluís Martínez-Ribes, marketing management; Simon Dolan, human resource management; Jonathan Wareham, information systems management; and visiting professor Richard Boyatzis, emotional intelligence.

International connections: ESADE has vast exchange programmes with 100 business schools, and offers various MBA double degrees with schools in Europe and North and South America. Together with INSEAD in France, and Cranfield and Ashridge in the UK, ESADE created the first European institution for training managers in social responsibility: the European Academy of Business in Society. The school also carries out joint research with Harvard Business School on corporate social responsibility.

Student profile: The average age of full-time MBA students is 28, with a male to female ratio of 69:31 and an average of five to six years of work experience. The class size is 180.

Cost: The full-time MBA is €57,000.

Return on investment: Previously it has taken around four years for students to recover the cost of the full-time MBA, but the new format MBA is expected to shorten this journey.

Who's the boss? Carlos Losada is the director general; Alfons Sauquet, is the dean of the business school; Gloria Batllori is MBA executive director.

Prospectus: +34 93 495 20 88; www.esade.edu/mba