Viewpoint
Alan Hochstein says alumni should help protect standards of their own credentials.
Business schools in Canada (and the United States) are in trouble, and administrators are not quite sure what to do. Graduate business training, once so highly prized, is now being questioned. Fewer and fewer students are applying each year, while more and more schools are opening MBA programs with specialized options.
Some business school deans say there are just too many universities in the MBA business today. Perhaps sensing weakness, the press is now routinely listing, ranking and recording which universities are supposed to be better than the others. It appears that this kind of information sells.
Regardless of public announcements, good MBA program directors want to know where they stand and what is going on in other schools. Like business managers in industry, we need to know what the competition is doing so that we can improve our own product.
If it is confusing to business school administrators, I can only imagine what is going through the minds of intelligent, young, motivated potential students.
Students can be working full time or study full time. In Quebec and Ontario you can get an MBA degree with classes held in French or in English. You can even go to a French-language university in Montreal and do your MBA classes entirely in English.
Students can choose a program that uses the case method of teaching or one that uses standard textbook methodology. You can probably find one that uses half of one method and half of the other. If you have a lot of money you can select the executive format to earn an MBA. The tuition for these private programs is high by anyone’s standards: the least expensive is over $50,000.
While all this activity is going on to make an MBA more attractive to applicants, a new and disturbing trend in choice is emerging that is threatening to make the MBA designation even less powerful and respected. Unfortunately, it will look appealing to the applicants.
In an effort to attract more of a dwindling market and to generate revenue for ravenous university budgets, the latest trend is to have business schools in Canada partner with sister schools in the United States, where name recognition matters.
At Queen’s, for $89,000 students can get two MBAs at the same time; one from Queen’s and one from Cornell, an Ivy League American school. And all this in just 17 months, while students keep their jobs! Amazing, isn’t it? Could you imagine a recognized medical school doing this kind of thing? Or a prestigious law school?
Recruiters must become more aware of the universities’ MBA programs. They should not be frightened to speak with the school dean to discuss the entrance requirements and pass rates, and to ask why changes have taken place.
[Also,] former students must become more knowledgeable and involved with their alma mater’s policies. If they banded together, even 10 or 12 of them, they could become an important force in keeping schools closer to the way they used to be. It is their degree that is being used and becoming abused.
Alan Hochstein is Director, Goodman Institute of Investment Management, at the John Molson School of Business. This is a shortened version of an essay published in the National Post on Feb. 8.
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