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Since its launch in August 2001, the executive MBA (EMBA) program at the University of Michigan Business School has faced a sluggish global economy, post–September 11 travel moratoriums, and a massive blackout that shut down much of the eastern United States and threatened to derail the program’s 10-day residency session.
That’s a lot to endure when you’re the new guy trying to compete for a shrinking market of senior-level executives willing and able to participate in a two-year EMBA program. But thanks to an innovative faculty and professional staff and a parent organization with a stellar reputation in MBA and executive education, Michigan’s new EMBA program has managed to fill its rosters and begin carving out a niche among its competitors.
“People said we would never fill our first class,” says the program’s director, Dave Ardis. “We filled that class and had a wait list of 12 people. We surpassed all expectations.”
Executive MBA programs have been part of the management education portfolio for more than 30 years, and with tuition and fees often exceeding U.S. $100,000 per participant, they have made many schools a lot of money.
Still, Michigan refrained from jumping on the EMBA bandwagon—until now.
“We were innovating in other areas,” says Susan Ashford, academic director of Michigan’s EMBA program and the Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professor of Business Administration.
The school’s innovations—which include breakthroughs in online education and the addition of action-based learning to the curriculum—have helped put Michigan on the management education map. The school shocked its competitors when it soared to the number 2 position in BusinessWeek’s 1996 ranking of full-time MBA programs—thanks in large part to what graduates and recruiters deemed one of the most innovative general management curricula out there. Since then, Michigan has remained in the BusinessWeek top 10 and was ranked number 3 in the latest Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive survey of corporate recruiters’ favorite MBA programs.
Michigan is also known for its nondegree executive education offerings, which include courses in health-care management and leadership development. In BusinessWeek’s 2003 ranking of open-enrollment, nondegree executive education programs, Michigan landed in the number 3 spot, behind Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
With all this going for it, why launch an EMBA program—especially during an economic downturn?
Michigan didn’t do it for the money, Ardis says, although the program is expected to “at a minimum pay for itself.”
Rather, after excelling in nondegree executive education and creating a handful of successful customized global MBA programs in Hong Kong, Brazil, Korea, and Japan, Michigan felt it had something valuable to add to the world of executive MBA education.
“We didn’t want to be another run-of-the-mill program,” Ardis says. “We had the confidence and resources to launch a program that would stand out from the competition.”
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