Quick Programs Solve Specific Career Voids, But Aren’t the Equal of a World Class MBA

A WSJ article last fall on “MBA Programs If You are in a Hurry” caused me to consider the roller coaster that the business school industry has been the past decade and how that might confuse the MBA brand and my school’s brand for would- be students. Here’s a quick snapshot of some of my industry’s key changes over the past decade to help potential MBAs make sense of it all.

• An MBA was by and large a US-based brand, pulling the brightest students from around the world throughout the latter half of the 20th century.


• Then European B-Schools, long known for nondegree exec ed, moved into the degree space with gusto, offering management degrees shorter than the traditional MBA of the US marketplace but longer than the nondegree ed they had perfected. This brought competition in the form of more alternatives to US schools for students from around the world.


• At the same time, for-profit universities sprang out of nowhere, offering MBA degrees in half the time and at half the price of the ranked MBA and EMBA programs.
  
• Distance provided yet another avenue for lessening the suffering of a would-be MBA student.


• Specialized master’s programs—usually designed for a very specific field—grew to compete as less expensive, less time-consuming alternatives. Specialized management degrees or condensed MBA programs shorten the educational experience (compared to an traditional MBA) in one of two ways: by eliminating some of the general management, strategy and executive management topics in exchange for focus on a specialty area within business study; or by bringing in candidates already specialized to focus primarily on the general management pieces.
  
  Specialized programs can boost career success for people at the early or entry stage of their career (i.e. if you want to start a career in accounting, your early career won’t require great people management or strategic skills, so you might not need all the skills of an MBA program right away). Specialized programs also work well at advanced career stages for those who want to remain specialized (i.e. if you always want to remain in the tech field, pursuing a master’s degree in technology management can enrich your career) but won’t be as useful if you want to move out of a specialty where you are pigeon-holed and into broader general management.
  
  However, for those who aspire to the C-suite, a world-class MBA degree program is still the gold standard because it is both broad and deep. An MBA that provides the full spectrum of general management decision-making skills across an organization is deep in quantitative analysis from accounting and finance, statistics, economics, and operations, then builds with practice in organization management, strategic planning, and often execution via work related application projects with the students’ employers or with strategy clients. Not all MBA programs go this far, and employers do discriminate: not all MBA programs get equal recognition as comparable products. The thought transformation and cross-functional abilities that emerge from thoroughly understanding the interrelated areas of business comprise the polish in “year 2” of deep MBA degree programs whether scheduled as weekday, executive or part-time.