A Degree Of Advancement

Are you ready to get your MBA?

by Drew Ermenc

March 2, 2008

W ant that corner office or a seat in the boardroom? You're not alone, but what are your plans to get to the top? One way to further yourself - and your career - is to get that MBA you always wanted. The advanced business degree is still a hot commodity these days, and record levels of students are enrolled in part-time, full-time and executive programs. Your competition for that promotion may be just be spending her Saturdays learning cost-benefit analysis rather than watching Little League games or shopping at Lenox.

One option for the professional women is an Executive MBA degree, designed for those in the workforce who don't want to quit their jobs to enroll in school full time. Dr. Faye Sisk, director of graduate programs for Mercer University's Stetson School for Business, says all the degrees offered by her school - professional, executive and full time - have value because there's a range of students. "I think the value is that each recognizes that individuals are at different places in their career," she says. "The executive MBA (eMBA) takes advantage of the skills and the abilities [of] someone who has experience. It's truly an executive degree."

Larry Bell, managing director of the Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State, sees the eMBA as the advanced business degree with potentially the most value. "In today's world, there are four logical ways to achieve an MBA, and all of them can be successful," he explains. "There's the Web MBA, [then] the full-time MBA, which I personally think is a dying program. It's mainly younger folks that have to quit their job. [Third is] the parttime MBA - ours is branded career growth - but in this case, you're not matriculating [as] a cohort or a team, and you have limited integration of the material. You're not studying the way the [four] executive format MBA works, where you are studying business problems the way they come to a leader."

According to a 2007 survey taken by the Executive MBA Council, an international group that promotes and advises eMBA programs, these programs are growing like wildfire. The average number of eMBA applicants in 2007 was up 25 percent from 2005, and because of the popularity, it's getting harder to get in, with acceptance rates lowering in 2007 to 63 percent, down from 2005's 67 percent. Why are these programs gaining popularity with experienced executives? Professor Ed Leonard, associate dean at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, sees several reasons. " This is an opportunity for people to work full time and still complete their MBA," he says, pointing out that his executive program specializes in developing highlevel general management skills. "Companies have flattened themselves. People need these skills to be a GM. The barriers have come down. As soon as you move up in the organization, you're not just a finance person or a marketing person. And that's happening much quicker." He adds, "Competition is increasing. You can't just be good at one functional specialty and be able to rise in the organization."

According to the eMBA council's survey, one of every four eMBA students is a woman. Joan Coonrod, director of admissions at Emory's Goizueta School of Business, thinks she understands why. "The eMBA program seems to be very friendly to women with families and families in general," she says. "We're seeing more people access what I call the parttime programs that allow you to work and allow you to not have to step off that professional track." What is an MBA worth?

Joel Koblentz believes an MBA can, under the right conditions, carry significant weight. "It's always better to have the additional credentials than to not have them," he says. "If you don't, your track record ought to be extremely solid." As a senior partner with The Koblentz Group, a senior level executive search firm based in Atlanta, Koblentz works with clients to provide candidates to fill executive positions. "If your company is looking to promote from within, they will look at a whole host of issues," he says. "And if there's a tie between candidates all the way around, it will go all the way back to the credentials. The type of degree is particularly important because it talks about if they've competed against the best of the best, and shows the hoops they had to jump through [in order to get that advanced degree]." Koblentz believes that women have an edge with an MBA in their pocket. "Women have the advantage if they are able to obtain an advanced degree from a top-notch school," he says. "I can tell you that many of my clients when we are doing either searches for boards of directors or a very senior leadership role, we inevitably present a diverse slate of candidates. In most companies ... they have an equal shake and possibly a half a hand up because of some of these diversity issues."
 
Asked how many among the female candidates he often presents to his clients have postgraduate degrees, Koblentz says the percentage is very high. "There seems to be a normal curve," he says. " Individuals who are in the latter third of their career, I would say it's fifty-fifty. Those individuals who are in the middle of the career, the number is substantially higher, 80 to 90 percent. And we really don't see those in the early stage of their career, given the kind of clients we work with. I suspect that those that are in the early part of their career, that's where you see the classrooms stuffed with people."

"The MBA programs that are very challenging bring a lot of value in terms of differentiating themselves," says Elise Schroeter, principal in the Atlanta office of Towers Perrin, a consulting firm. "There are a lot of things that are important when looking at individuals who have an advanced degree," she says. "I look for those [programs that] incorporate very practical experience. You can quickly tell that it's been more than just theory; it's been practical work. How much of [their education] is theory versus practice? You can run into some really smart people, but if they are not able to have some street smarts and business savvy, and they cannot interact with clients or business associates, then that can be a barrier."

Options, Options, Options
Many local women may not realize it, but Atlanta is one of the most accessible cities in the country for topnotch postgraduate options. The Princeton Review's 2008 edition of Best 290 Business Schools ranked Mercer's Atlanta MBA program No. 1 overall in the Greatest Opportunity for Women category. "Business schools have really changed in terms of who's in the classroom now," Fisk says. "Particularly, in our executive programs and professional programs, we have a high number of women who are trying to advance in their career through education. In our master's programs, almost 50 percent of our graduates are women, which is really high." Many of the local schools have specific specialties, so find out which programs emphasize what you're looking to do. Emory's Goizueta school was ranked No. 2 overall in Business Week in 2007 for its part-time MBA program and No. 7 for its executive MBA program. And Fortune Small Business in 2007 ranked the MBA program at Coles School of Business at Kennesaw State one of the six best programs in the country for family business research and education.

Tuition for these local schools ranges from $42,000 to $92,000, and schools like Emory's Goizueta eMBA program require at least 14 years of experience for its eMBA program. The eMBA survey indicates that the average age for a typical student is 36.3 years old. Coonrod says, "You have to have a level of experience. You don't come into this program with just a couple of years of experience." Leonard, who teaches several courses in the Emory program, believes this practical knowledge is highly valuable in the classroom. "I'm teaching a class now with 110 students that has combined 1,000 hours of business experience in it, and they learn a lot from each other. We take advantage of that by the way we structure their teams and give them assignments to take advantage of this wonderful network of colleagues that they have."

Mercer's Stetson School also requires its students to have considerable experience. "An ideal candidate is minimum 10 years experience; ours averages 16 years," Bell says. "In an ideal world, they have at least a business undergrad degree, although 25 percent of our students have a master's degree in something other than business. Another key is job responsibilities where they can apply what they learn in the classroom, and normally that means they are managing people and leading a team. In a perfect world, the person would have substantive business background and also be a manager or director of their business."

Coonrod sees the final decision to get that MBA as a commitment not only toward career advancement, but as a personal accomplishment. "It is doable," she says, "but a lot don't give themselves that permission to say, 'I need to invest this time in myself and to look at the long-term payoff in that.'"