When Garrett Koehn began his search for an executive MBA programme, a degree for working executives, he could not find what he was looking for. And that, according to Mr Koehn, president of the north-western US division at Crump Group, the insurance company, was an “acknowledgment that the world is changing”.

“I grew up during the cold war where the US was the centre of the universe and that isn’t true any more,” Mr Koehn says. His grasp of world economics needed an update and he wanted a refresher on culture and history.

Last year, he enrolled in a new EMBA programme offered by Spain’s IE business school and Brown University in Rhode Island, which combines humanities and social sciences with traditional management education. Brown is one of only two Ivy League universities in the US – Princeton is the other – that does not have a business school.