Since before the pandemic, Crystal Raviele, then the manager of ancillary services at Coastal Medical Inc. health practices, knew she was interested in a Master of Business Administration degree, and the career development she believed would come along with it.
What held her back was the time commitment required to not only take the needed courses but to travel and participate in on-campus classes.
“I finished my undergrad in 2002, and I hadn’t done any [additional degrees] since,” Raviele said. “I knew I wanted to do a master’s degree, but I kept putting it off. … I knew that physically having to go to a location and doing it part time would take a while, and with my job, it was one of those things where I was never going to get out of work, to class and home.”
So, she looked to an option that wouldn’t require so much moving around throughout the day: an online MBA program offered by Bryant University. As of May, Raviele, now the director of diagnostics at Boston-based health tech company Medically Home, has the degree she wanted with minimal visits to campus.
This pathway has become increasingly popular recently. According to a study released by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, students enrolled in online MBA programs outnumbered those in traditional, in-person programs during the 2020-2021 academic year, by a margin of around 1,300 students.
More universities have begun offering online MBA programs. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of accredited business schools offering online MBA programs surged by 85%, according to AACSB, after already growing 54% from 2012-2017.
In addition to Byrant, Johnson & Wales University, Salve Regina University and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth now offer the online MBA degree among Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts institutions.
Madan Annavarjula, dean of the College of Business and a professor of international business at Bryant, said the university launched its online MBA program in 2018 for students who are established business professionals looking to take their careers to the next level but may lack the time for traditional pathways due to other life commitments.
“We feel like we have the technology to meet them where they are,” Annavarjula said.
The online program also runs a lower cost, at $2,196 per course, compared with $3,420 per course for in-person MBAs.
The online MBA program was well positioned to meet students’ needs when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Annavarjula said, though the pathway hasn’t experienced a surge in growth since that time. New student enrollment was at its highest in the program’s first two years, he noted, following aggressive marketing from the university, and has since held steady, with 71 students in the program this year.
Students can elect to complete the program in one to three years, depending on their other obligations.
The online MBA program at Johnson & Wales University, launched in 2015, hit its peak in student enrollment during the pandemic, said Evan Grenier, director of admissions at JWU. Grenier did not provide enrollment figures but said that in fall 2020, enrollment grew by about 20% year over year for a single term.
Unlike Bryant, which launched its program three years later than JWU, the online program attracted fewer applicants in its early days.
“We really did start from the ground up,” Grenier said. “Thinking back to 2014, 2015, it was literally tens of students, even single digits in some of our individual specializations, and it’s grown quite a bit.”
Some students may have concerns that employers won’t value an online MBA to the same degree as an MBA earned in person. That’s not without reason. In a 2021 report by the Graduate Management Admission Council, only 34% of recruiters said they value online and in-person MBA programs equally.
And in that report, 69% of MBA candidates surveyed were skeptical that they would have the same career opportunities as their in-person counterparts.
Annavarjula said he hasn’t noticed these concerns among companies the university works with, adding that some companies appreciate the added flexibility that online MBA programs give students as they continue working while taking classes.
“At this point in time, we don’t [think online versus in person] matters a whole lot,” Annavarjula said. “I have personally attended and presented the online opportunity to Fidelity [Investments Inc.], to CVS [Health Corp.] and so forth, and we have had a very steady registration from those organizations. We don’t see there’s a difference.”
And Raviele left the program confident it would help her career moving forward.
“It definitely helped me professionally,” she said. “I got hired into the position I’m in now right before I graduated, but I think the program gives you a really nice knowledge base and confidence in your approach to problem-solving.”
