Posted on 03/26/2006 12:33:48 PM PST by Ninian Dryhope
No one wants to admit it, but the University of Texas changed everything.
The state's flagship university brought its brand of business education to Houston and upended the local MBA market.
Before UT showed up, Rice University's Jones School of Management was the highest-ranked business school in the city and offered its curriculum only to full-time students and seasoned executives earning Master of Business Administration degrees on the weekend.
Before UT, the University of Houston's Bauer College of Business abandoned efforts to offer an MBA program to full-time students and refocused its mission to cater exclusively to working professionals taking classes either at night or on the weekend.
Before UT, Tulane University's A.B. Freeman School of Business was content to have an administrator run its Houston programs from the private university's main campus in New Orleans.
Now, none of that is true.
Rice swallowed its long-held aversion to a part-time program and will launch an MBA program this fall for working professionals who take classes at night.
UH resurrected and revamped the full-time day program it killed in the 1990s and will welcome the first class in August.
Tulane hired a Houston-based director to manage its local campus in a Galleria skyscraper.
The end result: Houstonians who want to keep their jobs while they get a Master of Business Administration degree — which can cost from $33,000 to as much as $81,000 depending on the school and program — now have more and better choices about where and when they get that education.
"I didn't know that executive MBAs existed until about three or four months ago," said Jarren Garrett of Beaumont. "Houston has more than enough schools to choose from that I can find the program that best fits me."
Professionals can get an MBA at their own pace at Texas Southern University's accredited business school, which allows students to take as many as six years to meet the degree requirements, or at Sam Houston State University, which incorporates distance learning in its accredited executive MBA program.
But those who want a more traditional MBA experience at an accredited school while climbing the career ladder or running a business now have more options.
Garrett, a business development director for Memorial Hermann Baptist Hospital in Beaumont, wants an MBA to enhance the career he's building in the health care industry.
He has checked out UT, Rice, UH, Tulane and Houston Baptist University, but feels the program that suits his interests, job schedule and family commitments is Texas A&M University's campus in The Woodlands.
"Houston is big enough to handle all the executives who want to go back and get an education while they continue to work," said Bala Shetty, associate dean at A&M's Mays Business School. "I don't think anyone will have trouble putting a class together."
Shetty, who began running Mays' graduate programs in February 2005, says UT's entrance into the market has not changed A&M's approach to teaching employed executives.
"I make changes on a regular basis, but not necessarily because of UT's arrival in Houston," he said.
To be sure, all the schools' administrators say that the recent changes are not a response to UT's arrival.
The modifications at Rice, UH and Tulane have been discussed and planned for months.
But none of the schools date the genesis of their changes prior to January 2005, months after UT won approval from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to open its outpost in Houston.
"In our part-time MBA program in Houston, our yield rate is over 90 percent. That's over 9 out of 10 candidates that we admit who accept our offer of admission," said Larry Abeln, associate dean for executive education at UT's McCombs School. "We're not losing many candidates to our competitors."
Programs must evolve To staunch the flow of students to UT, the other MBA programs for working students in Houston must evolve, said Russell Robins, associate dean of Tulane's executive MBA programs.
"The game here is to differentiate your product," he said. "We're offering much more global education and more finance than our competitors."
Tulane offers two programs in Houston: one for working professionals with two to seven years of experience and the other for executives with 10 years or more of experience.
The school rechristened its professionals program, dropping the "Option II" label in favor of the "MBA for Professionals" moniker that UT also uses.
An international look And Tulane added a second international trip to the professionals curriculum — a four-day cross-cultural management class taught in Monterrey, Mexico, at the Monterrey Technical Institute alongside the MBA candidates enrolled there.
The school has also petitioned the Texas Education Agency to approve its request to offer a yearlong master's of finance program in Houston that will be a stand-alone degree and an additional credential available to its MBA students.
A dramatic change UH has made a more dramatic transformation.
It has revamped its entire program to make it feel more like an executive MBA program rather than a part-time night school.
The university eliminated its spring intake for the evening program and reorganized students into four traditional business school cohorts, which promote networking and collaborative study.
It also now requires every MBA student to declare a concentration and take three courses in that subject.
Traditional concentrations such as corporate finance and information technology are on the menu, as well as five concentrations in energy management, including oil and gas accounting, energy leadership and energy trading.
"This is to help our students reposition their careers either with their current companies or with a new employer," said David Shields, assistant dean for graduate professional programs at UH's Bauer College.
Student network Students in the new daytime program will take concentration courses in their second year with their evening counterparts. That allows them to expand their network beyond the small full-time class of no more than 45 students, Shields said.
By reviving the day program, UH will now be eligible to compete for rankings on the national and international lists compiled by Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and U.S. News and World Report.
"We are really tired of people asking us about our rankings and we have to say we're not ranked because we do not have a full-time day program," Shields said. "We're not doing this just for the rankings, but unfortunately, this is the way the game is played."
UT's Houston program has been in operation for less than a year, so it was not considered for the Financial Times 2005 ranking of international executive MBA programs released in October.
UT leads state ranking However, UT's Austin program leads all Texas business schools on the list with a No. 25 ranking, up from No. 34 in 2004. Its Dallas program entered at No. 46, up from No. 62 the previous year.
Rice dropped from No. 27 in 2004 to No. 32 last year.
The private university also saw enrollment in its full-time program drop after admitted students decided against quitting their jobs in favor of staying employed and getting a UT degree on the weekends.
The new evening program allows the school to recapture some of that market, said William Glick, dean of Rice's Jones School.
"The students, the alumni, all of the stakeholder groups had a little bit of concern that this might water it down," he said of the school's reputation. "But if you look at the top MBA programs, there are darn few in major metropolitan areas that do not offer some programming in the evening — and that few might just be Harvard and Columbia."
I saw an advertisement for the new Texas Houston MBA program in the Southwest in-flight magazine. I then checked out the Texas MBA website to find out the details.
It looks like a pretty good program. You take classes every other weekend on Friday evening and all day the following Saturday.
The classes are held at a nice resort hotel and you spend Friday night at the hotel after attending classes. You get up and have breakfast, take classes in the morning, have lunch at the hotel, then take classes for the rest of the day on Saturday, so there is lots of time for networking.
I showed the program to my daughter and she is interested, but you have to have a few years of work experience to apply, so she is not yet eligible.
Nice program, but expensive. Hopefully, her employer will pay for it if she ever attends.
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