Isn't there just a hint of a contradiction? While the world continues to wrestle with the consequences of unfettered globalisation combined with disparate rules, business school deans are betting the future of their establishments on becoming global institutions.

Pell-mell expansion by big-name and second-tier schools out of Europe and the US into Asia, Russia, Latin America and the Gulf continues unabated. From across the Atlantic the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, with its additional campuses in London and Singapore, and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, teaching its Global MBA in London, Dubai, New Delhi, St Petersburg and Shanghai, as well as Durham, North Carolina, are but the spearhead of a new US educational invasion.

Many European rivals have outpaced them, setting up campuses in Asia and elsewhere, or weaving webs of partnerships with local institutions to deliver home campus or double degrees. And even as institutions race to students, an influx of would-be business leaders for the post-crunch world continues to pour west.

At Warwick Business School in the UK, foreign students from 122 countries make up 62% of those studying. Valérie Gauthier, associate dean at top French business school HEC, says that on many European MBA programmes, 80%–90% of participants are non-national.

Management education, conceived to ensure our cornflakes were crisp and affordable, has become a global business in its own right, mimicking the behaviour of the brands its professors champion.

Why so? "Some see globalisation simply as a means to expand into new markets and increase revenues," says Professor William Kooser, associate dean for Executive MBA programmes at Chicago Booth. "We at Chicago Booth see the globalisation of business schools as a logical extension of the globalisation of business." The industry leaders of tomorrow need to understand the "idiosyncrasies" of doing business around the world, he says.

Judith Bouvard, dean of Grenoble Graduate School of Business, agrees. Schools must not only reach out to the best students worldwide, she says, but internationalise their staff and content, so that graduates are equipped to manage in a diverse world of national and international markets and cultures, bridged by global supply chains and global products and services.

Professor John McGee, associate dean for International Affairs at Warwick Business School, says business schools are responding to demand from the companies that hire their graduates. "Big international businesses are looking for upward standardisation of their labour force, and they look to business schools to provide a cadre of management that is consistent and standardised." National companies and even small and medium firms copy the behaviour of global champions, he says, leading to a "waterfall" effect in terms of demand for educational standards.

And that has created a global battle to build business education brands. Just as every affluent consumer wants an iPod Nano, rather than a mere MP3 player, so businesses want the assurance of a big-name institution on the CV of the MBA and Masters graduates that they hire.

A decade ago, brands such as Harvard and MIT in the US, or Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, pulled top students and faculty from worldwide with little difficulty. But as Professor Mark Esposito, director of business Masters programmes at Grenoble observes, 9/11 changed all that. Finding it harder to enter a less welcoming US, students from emerging economies began to look more closely at European schools. That spurred the development of newspaper and magazine rankings that typically repose upon the earning power of graduates. Today, business schools worldwide are caught up in a global brand-building battle, in which higher rankings draw better students and faculty, and therefore permit higher fees.

Make no mistake, management education is a business, from which the best make fat profits, and universities around the world have been opening or expanding their business schools to cash in. Sure, most providers and faculty also have a profound sense that their vocation is to educate the world. But as Professor McGee observes: "Universities are extremely bothered about cash-flow. They need to have profits to renovate buildings, renew programmes, and cross-subsidise programmes that have high social value but low income."

So today, 10,000 or more business schools around the world are battling for student and faculty talent, fee income, and what was once, quaintly, called status. Three international MBA accreditation bodies certify courses, but even triple accreditation is merely a step on the path to becoming a star institution, and many will finish up as also-rans.

Professor Kooser says: "I do believe there will be only a handful of truly global, broadly-based business schools."

Today, three strategies – business models, if you like – have emerged. Some, such as Chicago Booth, prioritise opening overseas campuses. Yet Professor Gauthier of HEC is sceptical about the US model. "For me the drawback of the US is that they tend to teach the ‘one best way', and that for me is not global. Global is teaching business from many angles," she says.

HEC, and many others, have taken a lower-cost, tougher, and slower-to-develop partnership route, developing joint degrees or offering their own via link-ups with overseas business schools and universities.

Sharing faculty and developing joint courses has many benefits, including more diverse and relevant content. "I believe that you learn much more and benefit from the local knowledge of the market of your partner," says Gauthier.

Another route, only now beginning to deliver on its great promise, is to develop distance learning over the internet. Warwick, a successful pioneer of e-learning, has 400 MBA students on its distance learning programme, most outside the UK, and Professor McGee says this could easily grow to 2,000.

Given that most MBA participants worldwide are studying part-time on so-called Executive MBAs, e-learning – which can put a star professor in front of thousands of students simultaneously, and create virtual classrooms – is a becoming a valued global education tool, often allied to partnerships.

A natural business response to such a scenario might also be consolidation, yet merging not-for-profit institutions across borders is no easy task. "Instead, you may see more schools taking on specialised, or niche strategies in order to develop a global reputation in a particular field," says Professor Kooser.

Indeed both are happening, though, for now, consolidation is largely confined within national borders to reinforce competitiveness in global markets. France has seen a spate of business school consolidations, and a similar process has begun in Australia, as business schools there vie for Asian educational leadership. This summer, Melbourne Business School agreed to merge with the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of the University of Melbourne with the goal of becoming a leader in Pacific Asia.

One deal that supports Professor Kooser's thesis is the agreement in July this year for CERAM Business School, based at Sophia Antipolis on the Côte d'Azur, to merge with Groupe ESC Lille to create France's largest business school, with 5,600 students and 138 professors. Professor Alice Guilhon, who will be dean of the merged entity, (which already has offshoots in China and Morocco), says its aim is to rank among the top 15 business schools in Europe and to have campuses on five continents, with the US top priority.

Confirming another Europe-wide trend, most teaching will be in the English language, and programmes will focus on a niche in which CERAM is already strong: technology management.

Santiago Iñiguez, dean of IE Business School in Madrid, has suggested that the economic downturn could promote a flight to quality by students – reinforcing the strength of the best-known management school brands. That would deliver scale economies that make it easier to win students in international markets, attract talented faculty and fund campuses around the world.

Business schools, like their alumni, are not immune from mistakes, including over-expansion. The law of the market applies to business education too, and past performance is no guide to future demand. Big and global brands will emerge, but wise professors should note that in many consumer markets, ‘buy local' is emerging as the next trend.