At a time when the future looks bright for MBA holders, the University of Phoenix and other schools geared toward working adults are uniquely positioned to reap the benefits.
They’re designed for people who want to keep their jobs while they study, the students now most likely to enroll in business school.
About 80 percent of all MBA students now take classes part time, said Jerry Trapnell, executive vice president of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. That may explain why nearly half – 46 percent – of part-time programs are reporting an increase in applications.
Only one in five full-time programs is reporting an increase, according to the Graduate Management Admissions Council, which administers the GMAT entrance exam.
Part-time programs have always been popular, but Trapnell said young professionals who typically study for an MBA have become more cautious about leaving jobs for the uncertain rewards of earning a degree.
“You are giving up income with the hope that on the other end you will get a higher paying job,” he said.
Students pay about $12,000 to $16,000 to earn an MBA at the University of Phoenix. Denver’s Regis University, which also is geared toward working adults, offers an MBA program for between $13,800 and $20,525. Students at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business pay roughly $56,000.
Schools like the University of Phoenix and Regis “have kind of built their whole infrastructure around entertaining and serving a market of students who can’t go to a traditional campus environment, and are looking for a very focus-driven program. They are market players for sure,” said Trapnell, whose organization accredits 506 business schools, not including the University of Phoenix.
Demand for MBAs lagged for four years, but the trend has begun to turn, and half of all 2005 MBA graduates had job offers by mid-March compared with 42 percent in 2004.
Nationally, the average expected salary among those who had accepted job offers was $88,626, up more than $10,000 from the previous year.
You won’t find any corporate recruiters prowling the University of Phoenix’s learning sites, however. Most students taking the business classes are employed, and their employers frequently pay their tuition, said Laura Palmer Noone, University of Phoenix president.
“We don’t allow companies to come on site and recruit students because the employers that would be paying the tuition reimbursement would take a very dim view of that,” she said.
The University of Phoenix has eight learning centers in Colorado where 4,500 students in undergraduate and graduate programs study. Another 1,600 Colorado residents take the university’s classes on the Internet.
This year it has launched an accelerated MBA program. Students can finish their studies in 13 months, trimming five months off the traditional MBA program.
The accelerated program also features computer simulations of business problems so students can make real-time decisions just as they would in the workplace, Noone said.
For-profit schools like the University of Phoenix aren’t seen as competition to traditional MBA programs like those at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, said Bob Ludwig, a spokesman for the Graduate Management Admission Council.
Getting into Daniels, the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Leeds School of Business and other more traditional MBA programs requires students to take a competitive entrance exam called the GMAT.
The University of Phoenix requires an undergraduate degree and a minimum 2.5 grade-point average.
Phoenix is a university with a twist: the school, which boasts 107,497 students on campuses in 30 states, Puerto Rico and Canada, and another 132,709 on line, is owned by publicly traded Apollo Group. The university accounted for more than 90 percent of Apollo’s $1.7 billion in revenues in 2004.
The company’s subsidiaries also include the Institute for Professional Development, which offers educational consulting services and Western International University, which offers academic programs.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-820-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
