Source: Financial Times
Adam Palin
March 8, 2015 5:22 pm
Since 2009-10, the number of schools offering online MBAs has increased by a quarter, according to figures from AACSB International, the accreditation body. By 2013-14, online degrees accounted for 11 per cent of the total.
John Fernandes, president of AACSB, says the proliferation of online options reflects the changing needs of students and the growing number who are unable to put their careers on hold.
“Many students taking online degrees are doing so to converge their working lives and study,” he says
Robert Monroe, director of the online MBA at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), says there is only one fundamental difference between its online and campus-based students. The former are “working professionals”, many have families.
For schools, it’s imperative to figure out how much working professionals can handle without it being excessive.”
Advances in technology allow some courses to recreate interactive campus learning through live video classroom sessions. CMU’s online MBA and the MBA@UNC from the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler business school are two examples.
The interactivity provided by premium online programmes is attracting the same calibre of students as campus MBAs, says Prof Monroe and the groups are now “remarkably similar”.
This view is echoed by Professor Idalene Kesner, dean of Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. She says online courses were once taken by older students looking to move up within companies, but now “we are beginning to see convergence in [student] age and levels of professional experience”.
While those enrolled on Kelley’s full-time MBA have on average four to five years in the workplace behind them, those studying online will have six to seven years, she says.
Caroline Bussenius, a student on the Kelley online masters of strategic management, runs a start-up business and needs flexibility. “I realised that a traditional campus-based programme wouldn’t work for me,” she says.
While the Kelley MBA includes live online sessions, they are not mandatory, and can be accessed later.
Despite the global reach of online MBAs, figures from the Graduate Management Admission Council, which runs the standard entry GMAT exam, show 87 per cent of test-takers sending scores to online and distance MBA degrees in 2014 were from the US.
AACSB’s Mr Fernandes says some students’ time zones hinder regular interaction, but he adds: “As technology gets better at shrinking time differences, we can unlock the global classroom.”
Financial barriers can remain. Fees for an online MBA at a top school are often comparable with campus costs. Tuition fees for CMU’s online MBA, for example, are $45,000 in 2015-16, while full-time campus students will pay $60,000.
Scholarships are widely offered by leading schools, however, and online delivery of MBAs is widening the potential catchment for sponsored students, says Gayle Allard, a professor at IE Business School in Spain.
Prof Allard says online delivery is having a democratising impact on the student demographic. “We can now offer scholarships to people who could never afford to live in Madrid.”
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