There’s at least one fewer application to fill out for recent college grads looking at business schools in Connecticut, but there are still a lot of choices.
Central Connecticut State University, which stopped accepting applicants for its Masters in Business Administration last spring, is still years away from restarting its program.
Though the school has committed to serving students who are already enrolled, the halls empty of MBAs a little more with each graduation. Christopher Galligan, the MBA director, estimated the number of students still enrolled at less than 30. Their last classes will be in the spring of 2008.
Still, a dozen schools in Connecticut offer MBA degrees, which is great for students looking for choice, but makes it tough going for schools competing for applicants.
They are not all the same, though. Seven of the 12 — the University of Hartford, the University of Connecticut, Yale University, Quinnipiac University, Sacred Heart University, Rensselaer Polytechnic institute and Fairfield University — have programs that have been accredited by the Association to Advance Accredited Schools of Business (AACSB).
That has put the pressure on smaller programs like CCSU to revamp their offerings in pursuit of applicants.
“Our MBA never really had the numbers that it should have had,” said Galligan.
He said AACSB has agreed to review the program, which could happen as early as three years from now. In the meantime, the school will be deciding what sort of a curriculum would make the program an attractive alternative to the other schools, as well as an allure to faculty.
“Faculty want to teach graduate level students so we have to be awfully careful going forward,” Galligan said.
Meeting Standards
Accreditation is no sure thing: AACSB reports that it has accredited 28 percent of the 1,627 MBA programs in the country. The list of non-accredited programs in Connecticut includes both public schools and private ones.
Business school deans recognize being accredited as an important step in gaining status on the lists of elite programs put out by BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal and U.S. News & World Report.
Richard Sorensen, former president of AACSB and dean of the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech University, said accreditation and related placement among the rankings have stratified the choice for students. More than ever, according to Sorensen, it’s a case of the haves and the have-nots.
The top 30 programs, he said, “have at least four times as many applications as they had as recently as six years ago.”
On the other hand, “the programs that are not in those rankings have less than 25 percent of the applicants that they had.”
Students that don’t get into the top schools might decide not to seek an MBA at all, rather than considering less prestigious schools.
Peer Review
Other schools are also feeling the squeeze. At Calligan’s former employer, the University of Hartford’s Barney School of Business, enrollment has remained at between 400 and 450 students during the past few years, but Claire Silverstein, director of MBA programs, said that all business schools need to continue to modify their programs, push their faculty to publish and market the school.
Attracting new applicants is “something that you’re constantly working on,” she said. She credited CCSU with trying to revamp in order to seek accreditation.
Richard Laria, director of MBA programs at the University of New Haven, said the school has about 300 applications per year by offering incredible flexibility via part-time schedules and small working groups available in Shelton, New London or Waterbury for students who won’t commute to New Haven.
“The MBA is very competitive in Connecticut. It’s especially competitive in the Hartford area,” he said.
CCSU will be looking to forge its own identity, and to meet the standards for faculty, curriculum and programming under AACSB under a new dean, Siamack Shojai, who begins July 6. Galligan hopes the new program will be strong in all of those areas, but not typical.
“You’ve got to make sure that you’re balanced in all of those things,” he said, adding: “Giving out generic MBAs — that’s not a wise thing to do.”
