This article was originally published Aug. 28, 2017. The CBJ is revisiting some of the biggest stories from the last 20 years, in celebration of our anniversary.
The decision, announced last week, to phase out the full-time MBA program that the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of business had offered for 56 years made big headlines, and it wasn’t an easy one, Tippie Dean Sarah Fisher Gardial said.
Nevertheless, the day after the Aug. 22 announcement, Ms. Gardial’s inbox received a stream of emails from other deans and academic professionals, many of them praising the UI for making a tough but smart move.
Academic leaders have seen full-time MBA enrollment slipping for years, Ms. Gardial said, but have been reluctant to drop the programs because they are highly visible in national rankings of business schools by publications such as U.S. News & World Report and the Princeton Review.
“We have finally decided the trends are undeniable, and rather than continue to put resources into a program that’s in decline, we need to prepare for the future,” Ms. Gardial said.
The UI’s full-time MBA program enrollment has fallen from 140 in 2010 to 100 in 2017, and makes up only one-eleventh of this year’s record MBA enrollment of 1,101. The remaining students are in evening and weekend programs like the growing Professional MBA and Executive MBA, which are designed to enable students to complete their studies while they continue working full-time.
“The market’s not demanding less MBAs, especially for people who want to ascend to the top ranks of leadership,” Ms. Gardial noted. “What has changed is the demand on the part of students and the workplace.”
Those pursuing MBAs are increasingly taking evening and weekend programs because they don’t want to put their careers on pause or run up as much college debt, said Ms. Gardial, who arrived at the UI five years ago. The UI and other universities have also seen a weakening in full-time MBA applications from international students – a trend some attribute to the Trump administration’s tougher stance on immigration.
“You could call it the Trump effect or the Brexit effect,” Ms. Gardial said, noting that she first experienced it during a visit to England after its vote to leave the European Union. Soon after the vote, she said it became clear to business colleges in England that foreign interest in attendance was waning, apparently due to concerns about how welcoming the country would be to foreign nationals.
Ms. Gardial said the constraints of state education funding in Iowa – a decades-long trend that has led to sizable tuition hikes – were one of the factors in the decision, but noted that discontinuation of the program had been discussed even before her arrival, and long before current university funding shortfalls. If it appeared that the full-time MBA program was worth saving, she said she was willing to go the fundraising route to help sustain it.
The UI will instead redeploy faculty and staff associated with the full-time program to its Professional MBA and Executive MBA programs, and to specialized offerings like a new master’s degree in finance that will be launched in the fall of 2018. No faculty or staff layoffs will result, Ms. Gardial said.
The UI offers MBA courses not only on campus, but in Davenport, Cedar Rapids and Des Moines. It also offers international MBA programs in Hong Kong and Italy.
If the Iowa Board of Regents concurs after a presentation on the decision scheduled for Sept. 6, the UI’s last full-time MBA students will graduate in May 2019.
If the Tippie College of Business’ reputation does suffer from the move, it may be because it will no longer appear in some rankings of MBA programs. Ms. Gardial said the UI’s MBA programs have typically scored best in measures of value to students, which compare the gain in salaries before and after graduation.
Still, she said most publications now rank business colleges on a variety of degree programs, not just full-time MBAs, ensuring the UI won’t be overlooked.
