Qualla: CBS International Business School

CBS International Business School: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cologne Business School, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk south from Cologne's center along the Rhine, past Severinsbrücke, and the medieval city quietly thins into the residential streets of Bayenthal. Here, in 1908, a private institution opened to teach German merchants how to do business in foreign languages - the Europäische Wirtschafts- und Sprachenakademie. The building it occupied is still in use, but the school inside has shed almost everything except its address. Today it teaches roughly 3,000 students from 75 countries, mostly in English, mostly the language of contemporary business: marketing, finance, sustainability, the ethics of autonomous vehicles. It calls itself CBS International Business School, and the journey from Wilhelmine language academy to Klett-owned multi-campus university is the kind of quiet German institutional reinvention that rarely gets noticed.

Image: Cologne Business School | CC BY-SA 4.0

CBS International Business School: From Language Academy to Bachelor Pioneer

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cologne Business School, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Europäische Wirtschafts- und Sprachenakademie spent most of the twentieth century training secretaries, translators, and junior managers in the practical English, French, and Spanish they would need at the export desks of Rhineland firms. In the winter semester of 1993-94, th...

Image: Cologne Business School | CC BY-SA 4.0

CBS International Business School: A Name That Changed Five Times

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Babbelbabbel, CC BY-SA 3.0. The renaming is the story. In 1999 the school became Cologne Business School - International Campus, preserving the acronym CBS. In 2006 it opened a second campus in Mainz under the brand European Management School. In 2016, the Stuttgart-based Klett educational group - publisher...

Image: Babbelbabbel | CC BY-SA 3.0

CBS International Business School: The Curriculum and the Center

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cologne Business School, CC BY-SA 4.0. Around 40 degree programs run at the Bachelor, Master, and MBA levels, the great majority taught in English. A semester abroad is built into the fifth term of every English-language Bachelor; internships overseas are encouraged and brokered through the campus career service. The ...

Image: Cologne Business School | CC BY-SA 4.0

CBS International Business School: Who Comes Out the Other End

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cologne Business School, CC BY-SA 4.0. Private business schools in Germany occupy a particular niche - they cost real money in a country where public universities are nearly free, and they attract students who want a fast English-language path to a corporate career, or who could not place into the state system for a p...

Image: Cologne Business School | CC BY-SA 4.0

CBS International Business School: The Cologne Campus

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Babbelbabbel, CC BY-SA 3.0. The main campus, in the Bayenthal-Marienburg district just south of the inner city, is a low set of buildings around a courtyard, a few minutes' walk from the Schönhauser Straße U-Bahn stop. There is no quad and no spire; the building looks more like a regional bank headquarters ...

Image: Babbelbabbel | CC BY-SA 3.0