After graduating from the United States Military Academy in 2006, Ian Folau served as a military intelligence officer for nine years in Germany and Afghanistan. But besides managing teams of people gathering data on enemy actions, he also built side businesses allowing homeowners near an Arizona army base to rent out rooms to government employees on temporary assignment and started an online rugby supply company.
After discharge, he wanted to develop a full-time business helping companies make open-source technologies safe to use. An MBA would prepare him to launch a startup, he thought, but he didn’t want to leave the workforce for the typical two-year stretch. When he found the one-year Johnson Cornell Tech MBA program, he knew it was the right fit.
[Learn about MBA programs that teach real-world skills.]
The Cornell Tech program, which is offered on a new Roosevelt Island campus in New York City, admits students with technical experience in the workforce who want to add business knowledge to their portfolio. They begin by spending 10 intensive summer weeks on Cornell’s Ithaca campus taking accelerated core courses such as finance and marketing.
In New York City, the curriculum melds business and tech content and emphasizes teamwork with other master’s students in engineering, computer science, and connective media and design. The program’s “studio” curriculum has interdisciplinary teams of students developing new product and business ideas to pitch to investors.
A fall term project gives students a chance to work as management consultants for Israeli startup companies and culminates with a short stay in Israel.
“I’ve come away from this MBA program understanding how businesses are built from the ground up,” says Folau, 35, who finished the program in May 2016 and has since started his company.
The demand for a quicker route to an MBA seems to be gaining strength, and business schools have responded with accelerated tracks that can take as little as a year.
Beyond the top-ranked business schools, interest in two-year MBA programs has been waning, says Andrew Ward, associate dean for graduate programs at Lehigh University’s College of Business and Economics, which introduced a one-year option last year and has no full-time two-year program.
Many people who have already been earning a paycheck are not inclined these days to take so much time without one, he says. “The cost of an extra year is high.”
Indeed, tuition for a two-year MBA at a top school can run $140,000, and then there is the extra year of lost salary, which is estimated at an additional $63,000 or so, according to Ward. Total tuition for the new one-year MBA at Lehigh is $64,750.
[See which MBA programs lead to the best jobs, salaries.]
Moreover, he adds, the one-year program is the dominant model in Europe, and foreign students, too, are now looking for such programs in the U.S.
Accelerated MBA programs are designed for students who show up with more experience in traditional business roles than two-year students, notes Kristin McAndrew, director of admissions for graduate business programs at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. The one-year option adds knowledge, a network and a credential that may hasten their career progression.
The typical one-year path begins with a summer session during which the core subjects two-year students complete in their first year are covered in an intensive fashion. Then the single-year cohort essentially gets the equivalent of the second year, typically merging with a two-year class if there is one.
“When you enter an accelerated one-year program, a lot of information will come at you in a very short time and you have to be very focused,” says Johary Rivera, 29, an MBA student with a health care consulting concentration at the Johnson Graduate School of Management on Cornell’s Ithaca campus. The New York City Cornell Tech campus offers a one-year MBA only.
What do one-year students give up? A shortened schedule allows for less time to explore business fields by packing in electives.
Because there’s no summer internship, MBA candidates also don’t have as much opportunity to gain experience working with companies that might hire them once they graduate, says Brian Mitchell, associate dean for full-time MBA programs at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.
Emory, a pioneer in the one-year MBA, launched its program in 1983. By contrast, two-year programs typically involve summer internships that frequently lead to jobs. In certain fields such as investment banking, employers tend to hire newly minted MBAs only from internship pools, says Mitchell.
“Employers like the opportunity to interact with candidates during the internship experience, reducing the risk in hiring decisions,” says Bill Valenta, assistant dean of MBA and executive programs at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business.
[Consider internship opportunities when choosing an MBA program.]
On the other hand, bosses who want to add to their employees’ credentials find appeal in the accelerated programs: One-year students at Katz and other schools often have been sent to class by their companies with the understanding that they will return.
Some accelerated programs carve out especially defined niches. Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, for example, offers an MBA program in nonprofit management for those interested in working for an organization with a social justice mission. Students spend 16 months gaining the business acumen needed to take a leadership position and help the organization succeed.
In place of an internship, Heller students complete a capstone project for which they work in teams to find solutions to management problems brought to the school by all sorts of mission-driven entities.
“Our group’s task was to deliver a roadmap for how the city of Haverhill, Massachusetts, could transition from incremental budgeting to performance-based budgeting” so as to better finance its priorities, says Elaine Theriault, 25, who worked for a couple of years with community organizations through AmeriCorps after college before deciding she wanted to effect social change on a larger level.
She says most of her core classes have been taught from two points of view — that of a for-profit and that of a nonprofit organization.
Georgette Phillips, dean of Lehigh’s College of Business and Economics, says the goal of Lehigh’s new MBA program is to produce business leaders who are trained to look at and solve modern business problems by taking various perspectives rather than any single disciplinary approach.
The skills employers are looking for — analytical skills, business acumen, problem-solving abilities, project management and teamwork — are not exclusive to the traditional longer program, she argues.
“As more universities offer solid one-year MBA programs,” predicts Phillips, it will become clearer and clearer that graduates “are as skilled and talented as those who have taken a more leisurely route to the same end.”
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Business Schools 2019” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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