The following article is reprinted in its entirety with all due consideration given to author Maggie Overfelt and website www.bnet.com. Food for thought.
You’ve seen the ads in pop-up windows and in the borders around your e-mail inbox: “Earn an MBA online for $7,000, no GMAT required!” If you’ve ever been tempted to apply for an online MBA or hire someone who had one, come-ons like these are enough to squelch the urge on the spot.
But then there are stories like that of Jim LeMere, 39, an insurance-company executive who earned an online MBA from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. The institution (No. 15 in Business Week’s B-school rankings) held him to the same admission and grading standards as its full-time MBA candidates, taught him with the same curriculum and same teachers, yet allowed him to attend class on his schedule. Oh, and he got to keep his job. “I traveled a lot, was relocated to Atlanta, and was eventually moved back to Indiana. Kelley moved with me the entire time,” LeMere says. When he graduated in 2004, a rival firm poached him, promoted him to vice president, and doubled his salary.
In addition to the Kelley School, Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business (No. 19 on Business Week’s ranking) now offers an online MBA, and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business (No. 8) offers a hybrid course that combines online and classroom learning. The online MBA neighborhood is gentrifying even at the mass-market end, dominated by for-profit B-schools like University of Phoenix and Kaplan University. In January, Jack Welch lends his name and prestige to the new Jack Welch Management Institute, a $21,600 MBA track that doesn’t require test scores for admission or on-campus attendance.
In short, the lingering image of online business schools as diploma mills is oversimplified, to say the least. True, no virtual MBA can make a recruiter’s heart race the way a Harvard or Wharton sheepskin can, but that’s an exceedingly high hurdle. The real point is this: In the right circumstances, an online MBA can indeed boost your career (and hiring someone bearing one can indeed help your company). It’s all a matter of matching your skills with the right program at the right stage of your career.
