Executive MBA courses address some of the most urgent problems currently facing the corporate world.
conventional MBA program, populated by callow overachievers only six or eight
years out of college, is an expensive boot camp for future CEOs. The variant
known as the executive MBA, for veterans of the middle-management wars, is a
finishing school, albeit more expensive and arguably even more rigorous. In
contrast to other employees pursuing higher degrees, executive-MBA candidates
are watched very closely by their superiors. They’re often given permission to
attend, and in many cases encouraged with offers of flexible schedules and/or
financial subsidies, as part of their company’s formal succession-planning
process.
Executive-MBA candidates are usually fast-tracked
executives in their mid-30s or early 40s. In order to catch up with their peers
with advanced degrees, they have to squeeze in their classes on weeknights,
weekends and painstakingly carved-out blocks of days off over an average of two
years. "It’s rigorous. I’d say the average students work at their jobs 60 hours
a week instead of their normal 85," says Edgar Leonard, academic director of the
executive-MBA program at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in Atlanta.
Over and above that, they have to complete their homework in every other
possible spare moment. They have to make their course work profitably relevant
to the full-time corporate posts they still hold. And, oh yes. At $77,000,
tuition for the Goizueta EMBA is a third more than for the school’s full-time
program. And there are no scholarships.
Other than that, the two types of MBA programs are pretty
much alike. "We pride ourselves on making the same demands of our executive
students as our full-time students," says Howard Kaufold, director of the
executive-MBA program at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia.
Considered the most prestigious in the country, and at $135,000 the most
expensive, Wharton’s EMBA program employs the same faculty and core curriculum
as for its $70,000 full-time MBA program.
Where the two courses will vary somewhat is in the
case-study method of instruction. In full-time MBA programs, students work
primarily from studies worked up by their professors. In executive-MBA programs,
the students bring their own experience to bear. Many programs pride themselves
on the fact that the research projects they assign, often centered on operations
of the students’ own companies, can be quickly applied to the bottom line.
Goizueta’s Leonard says that some years ago, a student sent to his school by UPS
came up with a study project that netted his employer millions of dollars in
savings. "And recently he endowed one of our programs with $5 million," he adds.
Along with full-time MBA programs, EMBA courses address
some of the most urgent problems currently facing the corporate world. At the
Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California,
where the executive program costs $70,000 as compared to $54,000 for an MBA,
business ethics is part of the core curriculum. Peter Withers, director of its
executive-MBA program, says that students occasionally uncover ethical lapses in
their own companies. "And it’s up to the students to decide how far they go or
don’t go with that information. In short, they have to make an ethical decision.
That’s part of developing leadership."
= Member Only
