The Case for a One-Year MBA Ranking

• While two-year MBAs are typically aimed at students with significant experience who want to reinvent themselves, one-year programs are designed for those who want to accelerate their early-career success.
• For that reason, metrics for one-year programs would consider how graduates progressed in their jobs after completing their degrees.
• Students also choose one-year programs in part because of lower opportunity costs, so another key rankings metric would be how quickly and cost-effectively graduates see returns on investment.

 
Candidates considering postgraduate education frequently consult media rankings before applying to schools. But currently there are no reputable rankings for a type of program that is common in Europe and growing more popular in the United States: the one-year MBA. By this we specifically mean the residential one-year MBA that has no experience requirement for admission and is aimed at younger adults who are early in their careers.

For business schools, accelerated programs are attractive because they provide financially viable alternatives to costly two-year MBA programs and traditional EMBA programs, both of which are seeing declining enrollments. For candidates, one-year programs are appealing because they come with lower opportunity costs, don’t require internships as part of the requirements of the program, and provide a rapid return on investment.

Existing rankings criteria for two-year MBA programs do not make sense for one-year programs because the two types of degrees are structurally different and aimed at different audiences. Two-year programs are typically designed for students with significant experience, while one-year programs are meant to help new graduates accelerate their careers from the beginning. For that reason, rankings for one-year programs should focus heavily on metrics such as job placements and salary and career advancement after graduation, not primarily on starting salaries.

Even so, some may ask why we would advocate for a new system given the flaws in existing ranking systems. Traditional rankings often overemphasize starting salaries, favoring schools that place graduates in high-cost markets while failing to capture program quality or the long-term career advancement of students.

Traditional frameworks also can push schools to prioritize rankings criteria over educational value and student experience. Because program quality is difficult to observe directly, and because most consumers do not understand how rankings are constructed, prospective students often rely too heavily on these simple metrics—creating incentives for schools to tailor programs to rankings rather than to students’ best interests.

But ignoring rankings is not the answer—reforming them is. Members of the higher education community need to play a role in establishing relevant ranking systems for new and distinct products such as early-career MBAs. If we don’t, there is a very real chance that a rankings organization will simply apply existing criteria to these new offerings and potentially create something that causes more harm than good.

The Reasoning for Rankings

While we are calling for separate rankings for a specific type of program, what we’re really advocating for is better measurement of these programs. We see three main reasons to create specialized rankings:

First, early-career MBAs are a distinct product category with distinct success criteria and production functions. They differ in three aspects:

• Inputs. The students who enroll in these programs have a wide variety of undergraduate backgrounds, career goals, and experience levels. Their motivations also tend to differ from candidates in two-year programs because many of these students desire to combine the undergraduate degree with an MBA for better career satisfaction and faster advancement.
• Processes. One-year programs compress the typical MBA curriculum, offer less time for exploratory switching, and usually make the internship component optional.
• Outputs. Success is measured by how quickly the program made an impact in the graduates’ work lives, how soon they saw a payback on their investments, and whether they were able to accelerate their careers.

A specialized ranking would avoid penalizing a one-year program for not being something it is not intended to be.

Second, current ranking frameworks for full-time programs create a predictable structural bias. Even if a ranking system never explicitly mentions internships, it can still put too much weight on proxies tied to the two-year system.

For instance, in terms of placement windows, two-year programs measure at three months after graduation, while one-year programs more often measure at six months. There are also differences in how the two types of programs consider the importance of internships and define what constitutes experience.

Third, a dedicated ranking would increase consumer clarity and decision quality by emphasizing different outcome models, thus reducing apples-to-oranges comparisons. A specialized ranking would avoid penalizing a one-year program for not being something it is not intended to be. It would ensure that one-year programs are competing with similar programs on outcomes that are relevant for a particular type of degree.

Trends and Characteristics

Why do we believe that now is the right time to launch rankings for one-year programs? We’ve gathered information from sources such as reports from AACSB, candidate and recruiter surveys from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), outcomes reports from schools, and research on the outcomes of internships. This evidence indicates five trends:

Demand is shifting toward shorter, less expensive, early-career degrees. Research shows that more students are opting for compressed programs. Many of these prospects also want to combine their undergraduate STEM degrees with MBAs so they can pursue business-facing roles that require technical backgrounds.

Candidates in one-year programs want to accelerate—not reinvent—their careers. These students are looking for educational opportunities that will differentiate them from their peers, deliver a faster ROI on a lower cost investment, and allow them to advance more quickly.

Internships aren’t core elements of compressed programs. Summer internships are considered so essential to traditional programs that GMAC research treats them as distinct mechanisms with their own goals and outcomes, not simply as lines on a résumé. While GMAC does not produce program rankings, this emphasis shows how integral the internship experience is to the two-year program. But in one-year programs, internships are either omitted, are optional, or function differently.

Graduates of one-year programs meet a different kind of employer demand. According to GMAC’s Corporate Recruiters Survey report, employers evaluate a range of skills and readiness signals—and recruiters understand that these signals vary across degree types and markets.

Candidates in one-year programs want educational opportunities that will differentiate them from their peers, deliver a faster ROI on a lower cost investment, and allow them to advance more quickly.

Graduates of accelerated MBAs, online MBAs, and hybrid programs are desirable employees because they possess both technical and business skills; they also often start at lower salaries than more experienced graduates of two-year programs. In addition, these new hires can be good candidates for leadership development rotational programs.

Multiple schools are already reporting outcomes for accelerated MBAs, including information about the placements and compensation packages for graduates. Industry publications also cover outcomes for some one-year programs, although this information is often anecdotal or selective. The point is, the data exists to build rankings for one-year programs.

Possible Metrics

Of course, the new rankings would need to standardize definitions for what a one-year program entails and what constitutes experience (whether that means multiple internships or other experiential components). They would also have to incorporate information about starting salaries, career and salary acceleration metrics, and geography. Without such details, comparisons are noisy and gameable.

Therefore, rankings for one-year MBA programs would only be viable if they were research-aligned and hard to game. They would be most valuable if they included three metrics:

ROI and career advancement for participants. Because participants expect a compressed program to deliver tangible benefits at speed, ROI would be the centerpiece metric. By weighting the payback period, these rankings would measure how much the program cost candidates in terms of tuition, fees, and forgone earnings versus how much graduates’ earnings rose after they earned their degrees, adjusted for the cost of living in the cities where they work.

The rankings could also track career acceleration by measuring how the degree boosted candidates’ salaries three to five years after graduation, while weighting those salaries by local cost of living rather than relying on nominal figures. Such metrics would directly reflect the market drivers of accelerated MBAs, specifically considerations about opportunity costs.

Career velocity and role quality. The rankings would be based partially on whether graduates earned promotions within 36 to 48 months, took on expanded responsibilities, and achieved their career goals for this time period after graduation.

Employer satisfaction. This could be measured two ways: by conducting survey-based, audited sampling; and by tracking the breadth and depth of employers who hire from compressed programs. This information could be distilled from employer-facing data collected during GMAC recruiter research.

The Time Is Now

As early-career MBA programs grow in popularity, they warrant their own ranking systems. Traditional rankings frameworks—which are aligned with the placement records and internship mechanics of two-year programs—are biased against one-year programs and designed for very different audiences. A new system can measure the excellence of one-year programs on their own terms and enable prospective students to judge them clearly on their own merits.

The argument for one-year rankings is not “Rank us, too.” It’s “Measure the right thing, for the right product, with the right comparators.” The right time to do that is now.