Most people who want an MBA are looking to increase their salary — and that’s fine. It’s understood that you’re looking to go back to school to change your employment profile and open up more opportunities. It’s probably the main reason you’re focusing on the full-time two-year on-campus MBA, and why you want to go to a hyped-up highly competitive highly ranked bschool.
We mentioned recently how graduates of online MBA programs report very similar levels of satisfaction with their choice of education as grads of full-time two-year MBAs, per data from GMAC Researchers.
However we’ve got another chart to share with you from the GMAC folks from that 2017 Alumni Perspectives report:
Hmmmmm.
Perhaps these numbers will change over time, as the online MBA becomes more accepted and more common, and more employers increase their recruiting from those programs. Right now, today, most recruiting from an online MBA is local to the school, despite the distributed and, errr, online nature of the program itself, which means that the students are more spread out. It’s harder for the online MBA programs to corral recruiters when there’s no campus or home base for these particular students. Even though we live in a virtual world, recruiting is still a face-to-face experience, and networking can matter.
Some more forward-thinking employers are embracing the virtual nature of the online MBA, realizing that if the students are dispersed then there’s a chance that the employer could fill open positions across its corporate infrastructure, or even perhaps entice an MBA student to relocate. However, the psychographics of the online MBA student imply that their less likely to be in a position to uproot themselves to pursue a new opportunity like that — otherwise they probably would’ve pursued a full-time MBA in the first place, instead of the online one.
The only other cohort with lower satisfaction scores on the financial benefits of the graduate education is the Master’s in Management group, which as we discussed previously, is likely attributed to that cohort being younger, and not in a position to leverage the graduate degree in their careers because they’re lacking the experience that you need as a necessary complement to the education in order to command the higher salary.
These charts are somewhat interesting for points of discussion and musings, so we thought we’d present them to you for your consideration as you look at your different options. This particular alumni survey is very broad, covering graduates of all levels of bschools from the most selective and high-end to lower-ranked ones as well, and obviously all flavors of master’s degree. The conclusions may not map to what your experience will be. But graphs and comparisons are fun to examine and hypothesize about.
Anything in these charts catch your eye? Tell us in the comments!
Tell us what you think.