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"Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success." - Henry Ford
#CornellMBAGrad
"Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success." - Henry Ford
#CornellMBAGrad
Dean Georgette Phillips
In 2014, Georgette Phillips left The Wharton School after 22 years to take over as dean of Lehigh University’s College of Business and Economics (CBE). Her main charge was clear: Take CBE’s visibility and stature to the next level. Without a full-time MBA program on the school’s roster, she knew her chances of meeting that goal were slim.
In her eyes, however, a traditional two-year MBA program wasn’t the obvious answer either. So she avoided the cookie cutter route. instead, she chose to listen to a market that’s making its voice heard. “I see an increasing reluctance on the part of prospective students and employers for the two-year,” Phillips tells Poets&Quants. “People say, ‘I want a rigorous MBA, but I don’t have the time to commit two years.’”
With her ear to the street and her eye on successful one-year programs throughout Europe and the U.S., she tasked CBE faculty with designing a full-time program that could be completed in a single year.
The New Way to MBA According to Lehigh
After 18 months exploring prominent programs such as those at INSEAD, Northwestern, Cornell, and Emory; reaching out to employers to gauge their appetite for one-year MBA grads; and building the school’s very first full-time offering from the ground up, Dean Phillips says her faculty designed a top-notch program that she couldn’t be more proud to stand by.
They’re calling it, “The New Way to MBA.”
Lehigh’s inaugural full-time program carries a price tag of $63,000 and runs just one year. But it’s not your usual academic year. This one starts in January and goes through December; just one of the differentiators that makes Lehigh’s program appealing, Dean Phillips says. “Many employers hire at the start of the new year as opposed to the middle of the year during the summer months. With our students, employers can say, ‘Yes, start in January.’ It gives you a unique differentiator in the marketplace when you can start a job five months earlier in January instead of in June.”
Another feature Lehigh is happily bragging about is the summer internship that’s built into the curriculum; something students typically miss out on with other one-year programs. When the school vetted the idea with employers, they learned that hiring managers would indeed hire one-year MBAs, but only if they had certain skills and experience. “We worked very closely with industry in designing this,” Phillips explains. “We asked them ‘Would you hire?’ and they said ‘Yes, if they had the following skills.’ We knew people who are job changers would be at a disadvantage without the internship added into the curriculum and that’s why it was really important to get that summer experience in there.”
Speaking of getting hired, Lehigh’s program also comes with a three-person coaching team assigned to each student to help them throughout their year-long journey and to provide career counseling. The coaching trio consists of one faculty member, one CBE alumnus working in the industry, and one professional career coach..
Finally, the program smooths the application process for potential students who are looking to switch careers or to simply diversify their skillset to get ahead in their careers. Lehigh’s one-year MBA doesn’t require an undergraduate business degree as most programs do. Instead, applicants can enter the program having any undergraduate degree.
Lehigh University’s College of Business and Economics
So what’s the catch?
There are obvious questions that arise when it comes to one-year programs. Is it watered down? Is it respected in the field? Can you really get all you need to learn in just one year as opposed to two?
The dean sees all of these as valid questions, but her confidence in the program overrides them all. “We are giving you the same rigorous, analytical education that you would find in the top tier of two-year programs and accelerating it into a one-year program,” she says in a promo video about the new program.
In the interview with Poets & Quants, she also further addressed the question: Is one year enough?
“There was a time in education where our goal was to cram students’ heads full of facts. But business education has evolved. This is not nearly as necessary today because factual information is available at the touch of your smartphone; you don’t need to memorize the way you did before. What you need to do is learn to think. So, yes, I think in one year we can teach students how to look at issues, problems, and situations and begin the creative thought process.”
“I’m not saying there will be no facts,” she adds. “I’m saying it speaks to the heart of where management education needs to be going. We have moved from a hierarchical business world to a world where networking and creativity are the prized attributes. The market is seeking students who dare to challenge the status quo and become free thinkers. That is how we designed this program.”
But she does caution that it’s not for everyone. “This isn’t for someone who wants to party,” Phillips says with a laugh. “It is a fast-paced, rigorous program. It’s also not for those whose learning style is to acquire knowledge bit by bit at a prolonged pace. This is an intense intellectual exercise where you learn quickly and act quickly. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, then a two year program is better for you. But if you are a fast learner, not looking at the MBA as a step out of work force for social reasons, then I’d say consider Lehigh’s one-year.”
Lehigh will welcome its first class for the one-year MBA in January 2017. Application submissions and enrollment are underway.
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The post Lehigh Disrupts One-Year MBA Model appeared first on Poets and Quants.
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