■ How long will it take?
■ How much will it cost?
■ Will I get a place?
■ Will I be able to cope?
■ How do employers rate this particular qualification?
While these are extremely important questions, there are others equally important, if slightly less obvious, which should influence your choice. These concern the suitability of the delivery mode to your particular circumstances , the approach to teaching and the focus of the content – how strategic is it, how international, how practically oriented?
Length of programme
Few students can afford the traditional two-year programme, so most full-time courses now take between 12 and 18 months. While some of the reduction in time can be at the expense of vacations and industrial placements (less important for those who already have management experience), some will inevitably be at the expense of learning. For those who can afford it, or have willing sponsors, a two-year programme at a top school is likely to offer significantly more learning than a shorter programme.
Part-time programmes are designed to spread study over a longer period. The duration will depend upon the expected commitment per week. You need to check how many hours you are expected to devote to your studies each week. In choosing a programme you need to think about what time you can commit, and assure yourself that the coverage offered is of sufficient breadth and depth to be useful.
Delivery pattern
Full-time programmes are now in the minority, and there are many variations in ‘parttime’. Traditionally, part-time study involved regular weekly attendance either in the evening or a mix of daytime and evening attendance. This is still widely available. However, because many managers have jobs which do not allow of such regularity, either because of frequent travel or because of irregular working hours, two other variants of part-time study have become common.
The first is the ‘executive’ model, which requires blocks of attendance at perhaps monthly or two-monthly intervals. This is only feasible for managers working in organisations which support this form of development. It has many of the advantages of full-time study – intensity of study, ability to concentrate wholeheartedly on the course, interaction with fellow students, the ability to study overseas for some of the programme, or with managers from other cultures. These are combined with some of the advantages of part-time study – the ability to apply what is learned almost immediately to work, and continuity of employment and salary.
The second variant is distance learning, which removes, or at least greatly reduces, the need to study in a particular place or at any particular time. The flexibility of this mode, the opportunities now offered for electronic interaction, and the lack of any logistical reasons to limit numbers, together with the high quality of the teaching on some distance learning programmes, have made this the dominant method at present. (The
Open University had over 6000 MBA students in its programme during 2003, with nearly half its intake coming from continental Europe or beyond.) You do need to beware, however. The quality of provision varies enormously.
Cost of programme
Costs can vary quite significantly, and are not always fully transparent. The obvious costs to consider are course fees, the cost of travel, accommodation costs, living costs if full-time, the cost of books, PC and any other materials and equipment. You may also need to budget for the cost of getting into the school of your choice. You may need to take the GMAT test (at your own expense), an English language test if you are not a
native speaker, and to travel for interviews. There may be costs for processing your application. There may be examination fees, and perhaps additional costs for studying overseas. You will be able to find information about fees fairly easily from the Internet or one of the MBA guides listed at the end of the chapter, but may need to ask specific questions to elicit the full picture.
As a rough guide to the variation in cost of study in 2007, you could pay in excess of US $120 000 if you include two years’ tuition, living expenses and loss of salary, £30 000 or more for an executive MBA programme, or about £12 000 for a good distance learning programme. The latter two allow you to continue earning so tuition fees are the main cost. Part-time face-to-face courses may cost even less, with a few specialist Master’s courses available from as little as £4500.
You may be lucky enough to persuade your employer to pay your fees and/or allow you time to study. After all, the organisation should benefit considerably from your improved efficiency. If not, it may be possible to obtain a loan to cover your study. A very few scholarships are also available. Business schools, banks and the World Wide Web are the best starting point for up-to-date information on current sources of finance.
Entry requirements
Requirements for entry vary enormously, with the top business schools requiring a high GMAT score (see Further information at the end of the chapter for books and other sources that cover this), together with a strong academic record and evidence of other achievements (as well as the ability to pay high fees). Indeed, there are organisations devoted to helping you (for a fee) make a successful application to one of these
schools. At the other end of the spectrum you may find programmes which will accept you with any class of degree, a professional qualification, or failing that, evidence of management experience. Sometimes this is out of a desire to attract sufficient students to make a programme economically viable, but low entry requirements do not always imply a low standard of teaching.
Three factors allow programmes to be flexible over entry qualifications. The first is that an academic background in management is usually not required. Unlike a Master’s degree in, say, mathematics, where you would be expected to start with a high level of knowledge of the subject, MBA courses assume the general intellectual level of a graduate, but no subject-specific academic knowledge, though the better programmes
will expect substantial management experience. Successful managers are likely to be able to operate at this level, even if for some reason they do not hold a BA or BSc.
Some specialist Master’s programmes will build on a professional qualification in the area, but some require neither prior specialist knowledge nor management experience. The assumption is that this is a good qualification for recent graduates seeking to start their management career in a specific functional area.
Second, there is a different cost to failure on a part-time programme. It would be highly irresponsible to accept someone who was unlikely to succeed on to a full-time programme, particularly if they were giving up their job in order to study. Failure would, for them, be a disaster. For the manager who continues to work while studying, failure may be painful to the ego, but is less catastrophic. Part-time programmes can therefore afford to take risks with students lacking the normal qualifications (though they should make it clear to applicants in this category that they are perceived to be at risk, so that they can decide whether it is a risk they wish to take).
Third, whereas on face-to-face programmes large classes are undesirable, and limits therefore need to be set, the reverse is true of distance learning. The larger the student body, the more likely students are to find others on the programme living near them, and for local tutorial provision to be feasible. Distance learning materials are costly to produce, too, and if the cost can be spread over a larger number of students, fees can be kept lower. Thus, there are good reasons for distance learning programmes in particular to be more relaxed about academic entry requirements.
Many, however, do set entry requirements relating to management experience, particularly for an MBA. This is linked to the shift in emphasis that has taken place in most European programmes. Once an MBA is seen as an active learning process, rather than mere passive absorption of information, then a student needs to have experience of management to gain full benefit. There are still MBAs which do not presume management experience, and more specialist Master’s programmes tend not to require any. If you do not yet meet your preferred institution’s experience requirement, you can either wait until you do, or select a programme elsewhere which is designed not to need it. (I must admit to a preference for the former option. While purely academic study in a management subject can be intellectually challenging, and good preparation for an academic career, there is little to match the excitement of studying a subject you have already lived, in the active learning mode – described later – that this allows.)
Read More : Key Dimensions Of Variation MBA Programme
