Back to School
Executive MBA programs remain an attractive option for career professionals, whose ranks are helping fuel increasing enrollment at regional graduate business programs.
by Dennis Boone
Heather Humphrey’s career track was doing just fine in 2009. That was three years after she’d left the law firm formerly known as Shughart Thomson & Kilroy to become managing attorney for litigation and employment at the region’s largest utility company, Kansas City Power & Light.
At that same time, Anne Spenner was in a newsroom leadership role at The Kansas City Star, but part of an industry with long-term prospects far less certain than an electric company’s.
Each had different motivations for doing so, but both ended up on a track that put them in the Executive MBA program at the University of Missouri–Kansas City’s Bloch School of Management, where they earned their advanced business degrees last year. Along the way, Humphrey advanced to the rank of general counsel at KCP&L, where she’s also senior vice president for human resources. Spenner, as well, has made a light-speed career jump; after earning her degree last spring, she left the newspaper for a strategic leadership position at her new alma mater—she’s UMKC’s new vice chancellor for communications.
“KCP&L has been a big proponent of the Bloch School program because of its content and ties to the city and our relationship with the school,” Humphrey said. “We’ve had a number of people go through it and have seen the direct results and benefits where they can immediately apply those skills here at the office.”
Her role in HR had connected her with KCP&L employees attending the Bloch School, “but I didn’t know about the program itself before I embarked on the experience,” she said. And now? “Often, in my daily business activities, I can point directly to examples where I’ve applied what I got out of school,” she said. “That’s a very satisfying feeling.”
Her own experience, like Spenner’s, is part of a larger trend at work in graduate business education: Over the past decade, growth in numbers of women taking the GMAT test to enter graduate business programs has risen more than four times the 10-year growth rate for men, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council. The figure for men is skewed, however by a run-up to 2008; the numbers of males taking the test have declined each year since then, while the numbers of women entering graduate business programs has risen for six straight years.
Count among the latter group Humphrey and Spenner, “I don’t know that it was a 50-50 mix” of men and women, Spenner said of their class cohort for the 21-month program, “but it was something pretty close to that.”
The GMAC’s annual assessment of testing is a key indicator of the short-term future of graduate programs because virtually everyone who successfully tests in goes on to enroll somewhere, the organization says. From its own analysis of testing applicants in 2010–11, the organization tracked applicants from 649 programs at 331 schools in 45 countries. Among its findings:
• 258,192 people took the test worldwide, with more than half—55 percent—being citizens of nations other than the United States.
• Despite a slight decline in applicants reported by 63 percent of full-time MBA programs, test scores indicated that graduate programs were enrolling a higher caliber of applicants.
• Interest in Executive MBA programs helped minimize the overall decline in anticipated enrollment in the U.S. schools.
• And, perhaps most significantly for the U.S. economy over the long term, the vast majority of the applicants to programs in the United States came from China and India, two fast-rising economies that will only become more competitive if those studying in the U.S. take their new skill sets back home, educators say.
Those factors, plus the rapidly evolving needs of businesses seeking to hire freshly minted MBA holders, are driving sweeping changes in programming at universities in the region.
Program Changes
Baker University’s Dan Falvey can point to two of those right away: Over the past year, the school has completed the most recent phase of a comprehensive program review. As a result, it added two new areas of concentration within its School of Professional and Graduate Studies—one focusing on health-care administration, the other in conflict management and dispute resolution. That brings to eight the number of concentrations available at Baker, supplementing programs in information technology, human resource management, finance, marketing, international business, and accounting.
“The concentration additions reflect our desire to continue to develop relevant curriculum Baker students can use to diversify their degrees and take with them in their professional careers,” said Falvey, the school’s chairman. Baker also added an early MBA program for those who have recently attained their undergraduate degrees, he noted.
Nicolas Koudou, director of the MBA program at Park University, cited structural changes there with the designation of four doctoral-qualified advisors to assist students with concentrations in general business, finance, international business and management-information systems.
Those changes, Koudou said, “were prompted to ensure our MBA program is following the business trends and the global environment. The changes will give us the resources necessary to continuously monitor the quality of the program.”
Columbia College, based in mid-Missouri, has been at the cusp of a trend driving enrollment increases; continuing growth after implementation of its on-line MBA program has pushed the school’s enrollment from 187 in the fall of 2006 to nearly 600 in the 2010–11 academic year.
“That has drawn a lot of students who are attracted to the flexibility and convenience of getting part or all of their degrees on-line,” said Steve Wiegenstein, associate dean for graduate studies. That success alone, said President Terry Smith won’t sustain by itself; Columbia is already moving to broaden the program’s appeal with changes this fall. “We understand that we can’t rest on our laurels forever,” Smith said. “This fall, we’re going to offer two tracks: an accounting track and a human-resources management track. There will be a majority of the courses common to all of our MBAs, but we see the need for those who want to specialize in these two areas.”
Ottawa University’s Kirk Wessel, who manages the program for the Angell Snyder School of Business from its headquarters in Phoenix, has been with the Kansas-based school just a little more than a year and a half. Already, though, he’s focusing on adding an Executive MBA track to the school’s lineup.
“We’re restructuring our MBA delivery methodologies to create an executive program,” Wessel said, trying to fold in seminars and lecturing components that will make it more attractive to executives. “We’re getting serious about rolling it out,” he said, “We have it on the books, but haven’t begun enrollments just yet.” He uses two words to describe what’s driving that: “The market,” he said. “We’re trying to move our program incrementally to meet stakeholders’ needs.”
UMKC, in addition to its executive track, offers a traditional MBA program that itself has been modified. This year, it was revamped, said the program’s director, David Donnelly, “to provide graduates with a rigorous and innovative curriculum that meets the requirements established by our AACSB accreditation standards.” That means a foundation of multidisciplinary integration, professional and personal skill development, and real-world problem solving, he said.
Like the EMBA program, the Bloch School’s MBA sequence generally brings students through the program as a cohort, Donnelly said. “This allows for the development of multidisciplinary teams and work groups that combine the diverse strengths of the student body,” a dynamic that he said helps participants recognize their strengths and weaknesses and learn the importance of creating teams to solve business problems.