Executive MBA degrees are generally expensive, demanding and time-consuming.
Aimed at senior employees, and often completed in tandem with a full-time job, bosses give up money and senior workers sacrifice several years’ worth of evenings and weekends.
So you might expect specialised versions of the degree, which provide job-specific, customised content, would be popular.
In fact, few of the business schools included in this year’s ranking offer specialised programmes, but for certain sectors and industries this market is quietly growing.
One institution, Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business in California, offers a part-time on-site MBA to employees of Boeing, the aerospace and defence company.
Terri Egan, associate professor of applied behavioural science at Pepperdine, teaches some of the classes for the on-site programme.
She says it is great to have a group of students with a common interest in the well-being of the company. Moreover, certain elements of the Boeing on-site degree, such as case studies, focus on company-specific examples.
But for the most part, participants follow the same curriculum as Pepperdine’s on-campus MBA programme.
On the other side of the US, the FW Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College in Massachusetts provides an interesting contrast to the Pepperdine-Boeing story.
William Lawler, professor of strategy and accounting at Babson, recounts that Intel, the chipmaker, approached the school in 2000 because it wanted to become more entrepreneurial. In Prof Lawler’s words, it thought it had become “too large and wanted to be more flexible”.
So business school and company sat down together and designed a programme that ended up becoming a full EMBA degree.
However, two years into the programme, students started to make discontented noises. They felt that the discussions and interactions were too narrow and insular.
It was therefore opened to participants from other companies and morphed into what Babson now calls its “fast-track” programme: a 24 month “blended” degree, offering both on-line and face-to-face learning.
Prof Lawler is faculty director for this programme. He remarks that a room full of executives from a range of companies and industries will tend to challenge each other more than would a homogenous group and that this gives rise to a much richer educational experience.
This chimes with observations made by Dr Kevin Schulman of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
The Fuqua school is one of the few in the FT ranking to offer a specialist option in health sector management.
EMBA students who choose this concentration must complete all core modules and four additional courses including seminars in healthcare applications of the core topics.
They emerge with a certificate in health sector management and a full EMBA.
Duke has tackled the idea of offering a specialised EMBA by presenting the health concentration as an an additional certification, rather than by creating a programme that specialises in the sector to the detriment or exclusion of core management topics.
For Dr Schulman, director of the health strand at Fuqua, the EMBA-plus model is a much more effective option.
He states quite simply that “most of the issues in healthcare are general management issues” and adds that “a lot of problems in healthcare originate because of a lack of general management skills”.
He considers strong general management training crucial for the industry and adds that if you “pull out all [people involved in healthcare] and put them in one room” then they will have no exposure to “cross-industry and general management experience” – just as students on Babson’s Intel-only EMBA found.
This EMBA-plus model seems a sensible way of approaching specialisation: students are exposed to all the academic and applied high-level management knowledge that goes with a full-time EMBA, plus an additional qualification.
It is a model that the International University of Monaco is opting for when it re-launches its EMBA programme next year.
From January 2008, the university will be offering an EMBA with a specialisation that sounds ideally suited to its location: “Private Banking and Wealth Management”.
As at Duke, students opting for the specialisation will receive a full EMBA plus an additional certificate if they are successful. In this case, they will be certified wealth managers rather than health managers.
Boris Porkovich, vice-dean of the university, notes that wealth management, like hedge funds, has become very trendy at the moment and that trendy things sometimes have a habit of “going away” because they lack solid academic grounding.
Providing an EMBA with a specialised track in the subject is the University of Monaco’s way of trying to ensure that this subject has more chance of sticking around.
