MBAs on the Move

For people who are midcareer and want to pursue an MBA, it’s often a challenge to juggle a full-time job, family, community involvement, and school. If a university can remove some of the strain by locating classes closer to where students live and work, earning that degree becomes just a little bit easier.

In the past five years, more schools have started bringing business programs to their students instead of asking students to come to campus. Increasingly, they have developed mobile MBA programs that reach new audiences. In some cases, these programs allow a school to work with a specific type of student—engineers, for example, or the employees of one company that create a tight-knit cohort of students who start and complete a program together. The cohort format keeps students motivated and helps to propel them through the program.

Many of Minnesota’s universities offering MBAs have established this sort of off-site program. Whether students attend St. Cloud State University’s program at Data Recognition Corporation in Maple Grove or the MBA classes from St. Mary’s University of Minnesota at Hutchinson Technology, more and more MBA students might never set foot on the campus from which they earn their degree.

In addition to making graduate school more convenient, these mobile MBAs help colleges and universities to better serve businesses, notes Michael Pesch, former director of St. Cloud’s MBA program and a professor of operations management. The physical presence in companies helps schools stay in touch with “what’s happening in the real business world,” Pesch says. “What better way is there than to march right out there and immerse yourself in it and engage with students who work in this environment?”

Same Class, Different Place

In most cases, mobile MBA students are earning the same credentials they would receive if they had traveled to campus. The same instructors teach the classes and the course material is the same. It’s obviously more convenient for many students, and others prefer to learn alongside co-workers, where they can easily apply situations from their jobs to their coursework.

That’s been the case for students in St. Paul–based Metropolitan State University’s MBA program for certified public accountants (CPAs). The university teamed up with the Minnesota Society of Certified Public Accountants in 1999 to offer an MBA program exclusively for CPAs at the society’s Bloomington headquarters. The university has since awarded degrees to 110 students. In addition to earning an MBA, society members also receive continuing professional education credit that’s necessary for maintaining their certification.

“It’s a wonderful mix of students because they learn from each other,” says Carol Bormann Young, director of graduate programs for the College of Management at Metropolitan State in Minneapolis. “There is a common thread in that they have a similar base of knowledge, yet they are using that knowledge at work in multiple facets, areas, and organizations.”