Elevating the MBA for Working Professionals

• Prospective students are not abandoning the MBA. They are seeking flexible pathways that align with their professional lives, and institutions that evolve their delivery models are well-positioned to meet that demand.
• Faculty are a business school’s greatest asset in program transformation, and prioritizing their input leads to models that are both rigorous and financially sustainable.
• Sustainable program growth requires deliberate market assessment and a strategic alignment between program design and institutional strengths.

Transcript

Amy Kristof-Brown: [00:14] There have been many questions about the value of an MBA degree, and there’s concern that it is now misaligned with what the market is interested in.

[00:23] We have found at The University of Iowa that there is still a tremendous demand for the MBA, but people want to get it in a format that’s very different than how they did previously. So, we were like many other schools in the traditional full-time MBA market, as well as in the executive MBA and the part-time MBA markets.

[00:43] We made a decision, as our full-time program became smaller in terms of population every year, we reached a point where we couldn’t really deliver the kind of program we wanted with a full range of electives, because we didn’t have enough students.

[00:57] Many MBA seekers are career changers and are looking to move out of a field in which they specialized—maybe it’s engineering, maybe it’s something from the liberal arts—and they are starting to move into a leadership position.

[01:10] We knew that if we could find a way to align that program with how people were working and what they wanted to do, with a more flexible program, we could then try to elevate more of the MBA for working professionals.

One of the advantages of moving to online MBA formats is that they have made the degree more accessible to different types of students.

[01:25] We knew that our biggest asset was our faculty and that we had great interaction in classes. People enjoyed being together, sharing experiences, and learning from each other. We realized we could do that in an online format just as effectively as in an in-person format.

[01:44] One of the advantages of moving to online MBA formats, or even to formats such as a one-year MBA, is that they have made the degree more accessible to different types of students. So we no longer have to wait for people to be willing to quit their jobs and return to school full-time for two years.

[02:02] When we launched the idea of an online MBA program and the faculty at that point knew we were sunsetting our full-time MBA, we involved the faculty a great deal in designing what the new program would look like. Part of that was listening to them about the size of the class they wanted to teach and the level of interaction they wanted with the students.

[02:24] We made the decision pretty early on that, even though it would be more cost-effective to teach asynchronously and at scale, our faculty wanted a synchronous program where they would still teach classes of approximately 40 people. And that’s how we designed the program, to be financially viable in that format.

[02:46] That’s what we’ve done, and that’s made all the difference in the world for the faculty. It was a big shift, but we lost no staff. We lost no faculty. We were able to simply reallocate the resources we had and do so in a way that enabled us to reach more students across the state.

Doing a strong assessment of the market and then leaning into what [the business school] can provide is probably their best ticket to success.

[03:01] The MBA has long been seen as a marker of credibility for programs. Right now, what’s exciting for business schools is that there are many different ways to make a mark in business education, and one of them is certainly still the MBA. That’s something that people will always value.

[03:18] But what type of MBA is it? Specialty master’s programs, or really strong undergraduate business education programs? When there’s a question of what the value of higher ed is, I think business schools have a very clear answer for that.

[03:31] We have a number of programs that can track students directly into very profitable career paths, and they can see an immediate ROI.

[03:43] I think for every school, what they can do best is lean into things that their market needs. So, doing a strong assessment of the market and then leaning into what they can provide is probably their best ticket to success.