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Boom expected for ‘blended' MBA programmes
News Barbara Barkhausen - 01.03.2012
Amidst renewed talks of a financial crisis, employees all over the world are more reluctant to give up their positions and go back to school for one or two years. This might be one of the reasons why the Executive Masters in Business Administration (EMBA) is so successful these days.
Many business schools experience a kind of boom in these ‘blended' programmes. The IE Business School in Madrid is one example of this development. The Spanish business school combines face-to-face education with online modules. The executive MBA students spend modules with the school in Madrid and with IE’s cooperation partner Brown University in Boston in the US. “This methodology has proven to be the best one for executives who travel a lot and cannot participate in long programmes,” says Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño, dean of the Spanish IE Business School. The online programmes have the same admission process and are run by the same faculty as full time programmes. The school found, however, that the degree of satisfaction amongst the participants was much higher in these blended online programmes than in the traditional programmes in recent years. “The online groups are smaller and the resources are better. Intellectually the participants of an online class know each other better and the learning is often more effective than during a 1.5 hour session in a class room. Executives can attend from wherever they are based so it is very convenient for executives who travel around the globe,” explains Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño the school’s findings.
In a recent ranking of EMBA programmes by Business Week, the Spanish IE Business School ranked fourth. Three U.S. schools grabbed the top spots: Booth, Columbia and Kellogg. This was somewhat of a sensation as Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management had claimed the top spot for 20 consecutive years after dropping two places in 2011. Apart from IE Business School other high ranking European schools were Iese Business School (Spain), Insead (France) and Esade (Spain). See the full ranking (first 20 places) from Business Week below.
Business Weeks EMBA Ranking 2011:
1 University of Chicago (Booth)
2 Columbia University
3 Northwestern University (Kellogg)
4 IE Business School
5 University of California - Los Angeles (Anderson)
6 University of Michigan (Ross)
7 Southern Methodist University (Cox)
8 University of Southern California (Marshall)
9 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
10 Duke University (Fuqua)
11 University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
12 IESE Business School
13 New York University (Stern)
14 Ohio State University (Fisher)
15 Emory University (Goizueta)
16 Thunderbird School of Global Management
17 University of Maryland (Smith)
18 INSEAD
19 ESADE
20 Washington University - St. Louis (Olin)
As comparison, the FT’s 2011 ranking of global Executive MBA programmes awarded the first three places to Kellogg/Hong Kong UST, Trium and Columbia/London School of Economics. The winners were all combination programmes where students study in more than one place and often receive a title from more than one university. Of the top ten EMBA programmes in 2011, seven involved studying on more than one continent.