The end of the traditional MBA – The Wall Street Journal

For many years, taking a couple of years off to get an MBA was a worthwhile investment for high-flying professionals. The boost to earnings and the networking benefits were enough to offset the tuition and opportunity costs of two years spent learning. But the calculus is changing. Traditional, face-to-face MBA programmes are becoming less popular and professionals are turning instead to part-time or online options, as well as to shorter and more focussed degrees in business-adjacent fields. This trend is in full swing in US universities and many SA universities already offer a suite of part-time alternatives for MBA students and a number of MBA alternatives. This is good news for time-crunched professionals who can't afford to take time out of the rat race. But it also means fewer networking opportunities, which was always a big part of the draw for MBA students. – Felicity Duncan .More universities shut down traditional MBA programs as popularity wanes.By Kelsey Gee.(The Wall Street Journal) The 42 University of Iowa graduates who got their master's in business administration degrees in May marked the end of an era for 160-year-old Tippie College of Business: They were its last class of full-time MBAs..___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Tippie joins a growing list of US business schools shutting down their flagship MBA programs in favour of shorter, specialised masters and online degrees..In May, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Stetson University in Florida said they would stop admitting new students to their full-time, on-campus MBA programs, funnelling resources instead to more popular online equivalents..Applications to traditional MBA programs have languished in a strong US job market, declining last year even at Harvard Business School, Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and other elite schools. Administrators say millennials, saddled with more college debt than previous generations, have grown more reluctant to leave jobs for a year or more to pursue one of the nation's priciest degrees..Between 2014 and 2018, the number of accredited full-time MBA programs in the US shrank 9% to 1,189, with schools reporting 119 fewer two-year degrees in the most recent survey by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Wake Forest University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly known as Virginia Tech, are among the others to recently cut their traditional MBA programs..Against that backdrop, shorter and more-flexible graduate business degrees have proliferated. At the business schools in the same survey, there were 140 new masters programs in specialised subjects like data analytics last year, marking a 16% jump from 2014, to 981. The data show online MBA offerings, meanwhile, doubled to 390..Business is the most popular field for students pursuing post-college degrees, but the strong economy has been hard on other American graduate schools too..Full-time enrolment is down across master's and doctoral programs in the arts and humanities, education and social sciences, according to an October report by the Council of Graduate Schools. Over the last five years, online and part-time degrees have gained ground in those fields, the data show. In 2017, there were 1.34 million graduate students over the age of 25 taking classes part-time, according to the latest Census Bureau statistics, reflecting an 8% jump on the year. The number of full-time students dropped 12% over that same period, falling just shy of 1.3 million.."If you were able to get every dean in the US under a lie detector, outside of maybe the top 20 MBA programs, every one of them would admit they were struggling to maintain enrolment and losing money on the program," said Jeffrey Brown, dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. After the incoming class this fall completes its studies, students will no longer be able to pursue part-time or full-time MBAs at Gies, although it will continue to offer an online MBA..Gies College said it had 49 full-time MBA students last year, down from 74 in 2015, and 38 students have paid the $1,000 deposit for the program starting this fall – the last full-time MBA class at Gies..Applications to the online MBA program have tripled at Gies since 2016. Around 2,000 students are now enrolled in that program, which costs less than $22,000 to complete, the school said. The full-time MBA costs $58,000 or more in tuition and fees, and it is expected to lose $2m this year, Mr. Brown said..The Gies MBA program was ranked among the country's top 50 business schools by US News & World Report this year. But with limited financial and faculty resources, and growing demand for the online MBA, the choice was clear to the dean.."This was an easy business decision to make, and a relatively easy educational decision, but it was an extremely hard call to make from the emotional side of things," Mr. Brown said..Jade Manternach, who graduated last month with her MBA from the Tippie school in Iowa, said she understood the financial challenges schools are facing yet felt an online degree wouldn't have provided all the same benefits to students, like her, who are hoping to switch careers.."The real value of the MBA is not what you learn, it's who you meet and how you're challenged by the experience, and the confidence it brings to rise to those challenges," the 26-year-old aspiring entrepreneur said..She and other members of the Tippie school's last cohort of traditional MBAs got T-shirts from the school that read: "Iowa Full-Time MBA: You Can't Get In.".Alaa Elhawwari, a 36-year-old training leader for General Motors Co. in Dubai and an online University of Illinois MBA student, said he found the virtual program better than any on-campus alternative. Before enrolling last year, he had been looking to sharpen his financial and management skills, he said, but was traveling too much to juggle a full-time or executive MBA program.."I have a global network of classmates in c-suite and director-level roles around the world now, and have learned so much from these people and the experiences we've shared together," said Mr. Elhawwari, who expects to complete his degree in December. He plans to fly to Illinois to walk with other Gies graduates in May. An online degree, he added, "is the future.".Write to Kelsey Gee at kelsey.gee@wsj.com

The end of the traditional MBA – The Wall Street Journal

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