BSc in International Management

ZHAW's School of Management and Law runs the BSc in International Management as a standalone degree at the Winterthur campus, twenty minutes by train from Zurich, with all classroom instruction delivered in English. It is worth being precise about this, because ZHAW also runs a separate BSc in Business Administration that is taught in German — International Management is its own programme, not a major inside that one.

The degree runs six semesters full-time for 180 ECTS. The early semesters build the business core — financial and management accounting, economics, business law, marketing, statistics and quantitative methods, information systems — before the international layer takes over with international trade and finance, cross-cultural management, global supply chains, international marketing and strategy in multinational firms. One or two semesters abroad at a partner university are compulsory rather than optional, so graduates finish having studied in at least two countries.

On cost, ZHAW charges CHF 720 per semester in tuition plus a CHF 500 per-semester surcharge for students who were not resident in Switzerland when they started — about CHF 2,440 a year, close to LKR 903,000, and the surcharge continues for the whole degree even if you later move your residence to Switzerland. There are also one-off registration and enrolment fees of CHF 100 each. That is still a fraction of the £20,000-plus a year a comparable UK business degree costs, but the Swiss cost of living is the real constraint: Winterthur and Zurich are expensive, health insurance is compulsory, and non-EU students may work only 15 hours a week during term and only after the first six months of residence.

Admission is the step Sri Lankan applicants need to plan carefully. ZHAW is a university of applied sciences, so it looks for practical experience as well as academic qualifications: where the foreign school-leaving qualification is accepted as equivalent, applicants are additionally expected to have completed a year of full-time commercial work experience; where it is not accepted, an entrance examination covering finance and accounting, mathematics, German and English is required. Equivalency for Sri Lankan qualifications is decided case by case, so it should be confirmed with ZHAW before you build a plan around this route.