Admissions

European MiMs That Offer a Double Degree

10 min read
On this page
  1. The short version
  2. First, the distinction that matters: double degree vs joint degree vs exchange
  3. Schools where a double degree is compulsory or built-in
  4. Schools with named, targetable double-degree partnerships
  5. Schools with an optional second-year double-degree track
  6. The CEMS route — the alliance-wide joint model
  7. How to actually get one
  8. Is it worth it?
  9. Sources & how to confirm

One of the things that sets European Master in Management (MiM) programmes apart is how readily they send you abroad — and the most ambitious version of that is the double degree: study at two partner schools, in two countries, and graduate with two separate master’s diplomas. Our what is a double-degree MiM? explainer covers what the format is and how it differs from an exchange; this is the companion it points at but never spells out — which of the schools we profile actually offer one.

Everything below is drawn from each programme’s own pages via our program profiles. One honest caveat up front: the exact partners, structures, fees and entry rules differ by school and change every cycle, so treat this as a shortlist of schools worth checking, and confirm the current pairings on each programme’s own double-degree or partnerships page before you count on a specific one.

The short version

More than twenty of the schools we profile offer a double degree in some form, and they fall into three groups. A couple make it compulsory or built-in — every TBS Education student completes one, and ESB Business School builds an overseas partner block into the core. A marquee group runs named bilateral partnerships you can target — Bocconi, ESSEC, HEC Paris, emlyon and St. Gallen among them. And a larger group offers a double degree as an optional second-year track. A separate route, the CEMS MIM, is the alliance-wide joint degree several of these schools also offer — a different animal, covered at the end.

First, the distinction that matters: double degree vs joint degree vs exchange

Before the list, the difference that decides what you actually graduate with:

  • A double (or dual) degree is a bilateral arrangement between two schools. You complete a full block of study at each, meet both sets of graduation requirements, and receive two separate diplomas. Two credentials, two networks.
  • A joint degree — of which the CEMS Master in International Management is the best-known version — is one qualification awarded across an alliance of schools, layered on top of your home master’s.
  • An exchange sends you to a partner for a term or two; the credits transfer back and you graduate with one degree — your home school’s. It’s an experience, not a second diploma.

Everything in the first three sections below is a genuine two-diploma double degree. The CEMS joint route is covered separately at the end.

Schools where a double degree is compulsory or built-in

For most schools a double degree is an option you opt into. At two it is part of the design:

  • TBS Education (Toulouse/Paris/Barcelona, France) — TBS is the outlier: every student on its two-year Grande École Master in Management completes a compulsory double degree with one of the school’s 160-plus partner universities, alongside at least nine months of internships. The double degree isn’t a track you choose — it’s how the programme is built, which is part of why TBS reports a 99% employment rate within six months.
  • ESB Business School (Reutlingen, Germany) — ESB’s M.Sc. Global Management and Digital Competencies is built around an international spine: you spend your first block at one of ESB’s overseas partner schools — in France, Ireland, Italy or Canada — and several of these partner tracks are full double degrees. The application deadlines even vary by double-degree track (Italian-German, Franco-German, Irish-German, Canadian-German). It charges no tuition beyond the public semester contribution, so it’s a rare tuition-free route to a two-country credential.

Schools with named, targetable double-degree partnerships

These schools publish specific partner institutions, so you can pick a school partly for the pairing that fits your target market:

  • Bocconi (Milan, Italy) — Bocconi’s MSc in International Management runs its double degrees as tracks you choose after the first semester: a Fudan University double degree in Shanghai, an ESSEC double degree in Singapore, and an ESSEC luxury-management double degree across Paris and Singapore — plus the CEMS MIM. Italy’s strongest MiM (FT #13) turns its second year into a genuine two-country decision.
  • ESSEC (Cergy, France) — ESSEC isn’t a CEMS member, so its answer to mobility is its three-campus network (Cergy, Singapore, Rabat) plus an unusually broad double-degree portfolio: Bocconi, Mannheim, Peking University, HKUST, MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, UCLA Law and King’s College London among them. Few MiMs reach as many top global partners.
  • HEC Paris (Jouy-en-Josas, France) — Europe’s #1 MiM hosts dual-degree students at around thirty partner institutions, including MIT Sloan, Yale SOM, Tsinghua, NUS, Berkeley Haas and the LSE, plus its own French joint programmes with Polytechnique, ENSAE and Sciences Po for engineering and quantitative tracks. The dual degree adds a customisation year on top of an already-broad M2.
  • emlyon (Lyon, France) — not a CEMS member, emlyon leans instead on a bilateral double-degree network: WHU (Germany), Aston (UK), HEC Montréal (Canada), Tongji SEM (China), KAIST (South Korea) and USP (Brazil). Students swap the standard second year for a year at the partner school — the closest equivalent to CEMS at emlyon.
  • St. Gallen (St. Gallen, Switzerland) — the FT-#1 SIM-HSG master offers formal double degrees with Nanyang (Singapore), INCAE (Costa Rica), ESADE (Barcelona), RSM Erasmus (Rotterdam), HEC Paris and FGV-EAESP (São Paulo). You apply for these in your first term and typically spend an extra 6–12 months at the partner, graduating with two master’s degrees.
  • Nova SBE (Lisbon, Portugal) — alongside the CEMS option, Nova’s International Master in Management runs double-degree partnerships with Maastricht University (Netherlands) and Insper (Brazil) for students who want a structured second-country experience — at what is by some distance the lowest tuition of any top-10 European MiM.
  • SGH Warsaw (Warsaw, Poland) — SGH’s International Business master builds in double-degree partnerships with Prague University of Economics and Business, European University Viadrina and the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), and EDHEC and TBS Education (France), and doubles as an explicit pathway to the CEMS MIM — strong international optionality at a low public-university fee.
  • University of Groningen (Groningen, Netherlands) — Groningen’s MSc profiles include a double-degree option with Católica Porto Business School, letting students add an international qualification to the one-year Dutch degree.
  • UPF Barcelona School of Management (Barcelona, Spain) — UPF-BSM pairs its QTEM study-abroad track with double-degree routes at BI Norwegian Business School — a mid-priced, EQUIS/AMBA-accredited Barcelona option with genuine built-in mobility.

A related in-house variant: IE Business School (Madrid) offers a dual degree that pairs its Master in Management with its Master in Finance — two IE diplomas rather than two countries, but a genuine second qualification for students who want to add a finance credential to the generalist MiM.

Schools with an optional second-year double-degree track

At a wider group of (largely French grande école) schools, a double degree is one of the specialisation routes you can choose for your second year rather than a named headline pairing:

  • EDHEC (Lille/Nice, France) — the Global MiM (GETT) is a distinct, higher-priced double-degree track sitting alongside EDHEC’s Business Management, Finance and Data Science routes.
  • KEDGE (Bordeaux/Marseille, France) — students can take one of several MSc specialisations as a double degree in the second year; the option raises tuition to about €18,600/year plus a €2,500 supplement.
  • NEOMA (Reims/Rouen, France) — NEOMA’s Grande École MiM offers an unusually wide set of international double degrees with partner universities as a second-year choice, alongside its MSc specialisations.
  • Rennes School of Business (Rennes, France) — Master 2 opens up double-degree options drawing on Rennes’s 330-plus partner universities — fitting for one of the more genuinely English-language, internationally staffed French MiMs.
  • Esade (Barcelona, Spain) — students can extend the one-year MSc into a two-year track with a double degree (or the CEMS MIM), with the second-year fee running around €20,500–€24,500.
  • Louvain School of Management (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) — the two-year LSM master offers both CEMS and double-degree tracks, and graduates of double-degree partner universities are even exempt from its GMAT requirement.
  • Kozminski University (Warsaw, Poland) — Poland’s top-ranked, triple-crown MiM offers double-degree options with partner universities abroad across its contemporary majors (AI in Business, ESG, Digital Marketing).
  • Tilburg University (Tilburg, Netherlands) — the one-year MSc International Management makes exchange and double-degree options available, alongside its QTEM network route.
  • ZHAW School of Management (Winterthur, Switzerland) — the three-semester English-taught master offers double-degree options at international partner schools for a small, highly international cohort.

The CEMS route — the alliance-wide joint model

Several of the schools above also belong to CEMS, the alliance of one leading business school per country whose CEMS Master in International Management is a joint degree layered on your home master’s. Because it’s a single alliance-wide credential rather than a bilateral two-diploma arrangement, we cover the full mechanics — the exchange semester, the corporate business project, the language requirements, and which schools are members — in the dedicated CEMS explainer rather than re-listing it here. Among the schools we profile, HEC, Bocconi, Nova, St. Gallen, NHH, Louvain and SGH offer the CEMS route alongside (or instead of) a bilateral double degree.

How to actually get one

The pattern is consistent across almost all of these schools:

  1. Apply to the home school’s MiM through its normal admissions process.
  2. Apply or are selected into the double-degree track during the programme — usually at the end of the first year, for a second year or extra semesters at the partner. Places are competitive and can carry a minimum-GPA or language condition.
  3. Confirm the current partner list and requirements on the school’s own double-degree page before you count on a specific pairing — they change every cycle.

The exceptions prove the rule: at TBS the double degree is compulsory, and at ESB the partner block is built into the core structure, so there’s no separate track to win a place on.

Is it worth it?

A double degree is a deliberate specialisation of your MiM toward an international career: worth the extra time and cost when you want to work across two countries or break into a market where the partner’s diploma carries weight, and overkill when your goals are local or you simply want the fastest route into the job market. For the full trade-off — double degree vs exchange vs the CEMS joint model, and who each suits — read what is a double-degree MiM?. To weigh which schools’ partnerships fit your plan, browse the full catalogue and the composite rankings, build a shortlist, and keep every round straight on the deadline tracker.

Sources & how to confirm

Every school-specific claim above is drawn from that programme’s own pages, synthesised in our program profiles with a source and a last-checked date on each. We name only partnerships a school itself publishes, and quote no fee or partner we can’t source — where a school’s current double-degree list wasn’t confirmable, we’ve left it out rather than guess. The partners, structures, fees and selection rules for double degrees change every cycle, so no specific pairing here is guaranteed: confirm the current details on each programme’s own double-degree or partnerships page before you rely on them. Last checked July 2026.

Common questions

Which European MiMs offer a double degree?
More than twenty of the schools we profile build a double degree into their Master in Management in some form. For some it is compulsory — every student at TBS Education completes one, and ESB Business School's whole programme is built around an overseas partner block, several of them full double degrees. Others carry named marquee partnerships: Bocconi runs double degrees with Fudan in Shanghai and with ESSEC (Singapore and luxury), ESSEC pairs with Bocconi, Mannheim, Peking, HKUST, MIT, Yale and others, HEC Paris hosts dual degrees at around thirty partners including MIT Sloan, Yale SOM and Tsinghua, emlyon runs bilateral degrees with WHU, Aston, HEC Montréal, Tongji, KAIST and USP, and St. Gallen's SIM offers Nanyang, INCAE, ESADE, RSM, HEC Paris and FGV. A larger group — EDHEC, KEDGE, NEOMA, Rennes, Esade, Louvain, Kozminski, Tilburg, ZHAW, Nova, SGH Warsaw, Groningen and UPF Barcelona — offers a double degree as an optional second-year track. The exact partners change every cycle, so treat this as a shortlist to verify on each school's own partnerships page.
What is the difference between a double degree and the CEMS MIM?
Both let you study across more than one school, but the credential is structured differently. A classic double degree is a bilateral arrangement between two schools: you complete a block of study at each, meet both graduation requirements, and receive two separate diplomas — one from each institution. The CEMS Master in International Management is a joint degree run by an alliance of one top school per country: you add it on top of your home master's by completing an exchange semester at a CEMS partner, an international business project and language requirements, and graduate with your home degree plus the single CEMS MIM shared across the alliance. So a double degree is two diplomas from two named partners; CEMS is one extra alliance-wide diploma layered on your home MiM. Schools like HEC, Bocconi, Nova, St. Gallen, NHH, Louvain and SGH offer the CEMS route alongside their bilateral double degrees.
Does a double degree cost more than a normal MiM?
Usually, yes. Because you complete a full block of study at a second school, a double degree often adds time and cost rather than replacing part of your home programme. Some schools price it explicitly: KEDGE adds roughly a €2,500 supplement (and a higher per-year fee) for the double-degree route, EDHEC prices its Global MiM (GETT) double-degree track above its standard tracks, and Esade's two-year double-degree option carries a second-year fee of around €20,500–€24,500 on top of the base tuition. You may also fund a second relocation and set of living costs in another country. Weigh the second diploma's value in your target market against the extra time and money, and confirm the current figures on each school's own fees and double-degree pages, because they change every cycle.
How do I get onto a double-degree track?
In almost every case you apply to the home school's Master in Management through its normal admissions process first, then apply or are selected into the double-degree track during the programme — most often at the end of the first year, for a second year (or extra semesters) spent at the partner school. Places are typically competitive and can carry academic conditions (a minimum GPA) or language requirements for the partner country. A few schools differ: TBS makes a double degree compulsory for every student, and ESB builds the international partner block into the core structure. Because the process, partners and conditions differ by school and are revised each year, the only reliable source is each programme's own double-degree or partnerships page — confirm the current list before you count on a specific pairing.
Is a double degree worth it for a MiM?
It depends on your goals. A double degree is worth it if you want to build a career across two countries, break into a market where the partner school's diploma carries real weight, or graduate with two alumni networks and an unambiguous international signal — and you can absorb the extra time and cost. If your goals are more local, or you want the fastest, cheapest route into the job market, a single MiM (perhaps with an exchange semester, which gives you the study-abroad experience without a second diploma) may serve you just as well. For the full trade-off — double degree vs exchange vs the CEMS joint model, and who each suits — see our explainer on what a double-degree MiM is.
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