In December, a group of pioneering students from the University of Florida in Gainsville will receive Masters of Business Administration degrees. They will be the first class at the university to complete a two-year M.B.A. program conducted entirely over the Internet.
They're some of the small but growing number of professionals opting for an advanced business degree without having to take a two-year work hiatus. There are only about ten accredited colleges in the U.S. that offer Internet-based M.B.A. degrees, but countless correspondence schools offer degrees from the backside of matchbooks.
Despite its polluted reputation, advanced distance learning--the accredited kind--has already had a major impact on the professional lives of some UF students, putting it at least on par with its in-person counterpart. There would be no "scarlet letter" identifying an accredited M.B.A. program as one that's Internet-based.
That's because schools have learned that Internet learning cannot exist as an adjunct to traditional learning. It has to be fully integrated into the regular curriculum, taught by the same professors and held to the same admissions and grading standards as other programs.
"Distance learning had a reputation as a for-profit enterprise, but our Internet M.B.A. program is identical to our traditional program," says John Kraft, dean of the graduate business school at UF and chairman of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the 85-year old gold standard of accreditation. "The faculty has to want to do this. They can't believe it's a lesser type of learning. That's why you have to fit it in with traditional degree programs, or it just won't work."
Most of the students pursuing degrees this way do so because they have full-time jobs. Lots of them have families and can't afford to take two years off to study. Some UF students say they've already been able to apply what they've learned to their jobs.
"I started to see more and more emphasis for advanced degrees," says Steve Northlund, 33, a business unit executive at
He says IBM is helping to subsidize the roughly $30,000 annual tuition. But more importantly, he can get the degree on essentially his own terms. There are deadlines and coursework and conference calls, but the students, who are spread out all over the country, take the lectures whenever they want. The lectures come on a CD--which fights the bandwidth issue associated with streaming media--and students take it whenever they can squeeze it in.
That made a big difference to another soon-to-be UF grad. "My job requires me to transfer quite a bit, [and] I didn't want to miss a beat during [job] transfers," says James McCoy, 42, a fleet operations manger for
Kraft believes that by 2005, dozens more schools will offer Internet M.B.A.s, first because of the competition between schools for students and second because it will be considered simply another delivery mechanism for coursework and degrees. "It will be part of everyone's portfolio, but people shouldn't underestimate what it takes to deliver this," he says, citing the complex technology involved.
Some Ivy League schools like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have said they have no plans to offer Internet M.B.A.s, although they do make some coursework available online. The addition of a conservative school like Harvard to the ranks of Internet M.B.A.s would certainly add more credibility to the whole idea.
Despite the fact respected institutions like Duke and Purdue offer online M.B.A. degrees, Harvard is undoubtedly concerned about diluting its reputation by offering its revered M.B.A. degree over the Internet.
But you can't stop progress. There are thousands of busy executives who can't or won't stop working to get an M.B.A., but they are clearly willing to give up nights and weekends to get an advanced degree from an accredited business school. And schools that don't step up to offer it will be considered relics.
Consider the main reasons people get an M.B.A.: to make connections for networking purposes and to make oneself more suitable for promotions.
According to two UF students, they have already achieved those things. "I started hearing about UF in our company from top executives who said they were UF grads. The network is pretty strong," says IBM's Northlund.
"I know [the degree] will improve my career and make me more promotable," says Chrysler's McCoy.