Welcome to MBA podcaster—the only source for cutting-edge information and advice on the MBA application process. These days, online education is a household term. In 2004, more than 2 million people have taken an online course, according to the Sloan Consortium. But the same study found that close to half of all schools with MBA programs last year offered business-degree programs online. Online education is moving to the mainstream, but there is some stigma attached to the term. We’ll find out why that is, we’ll find out where you can seek out quality MBA programs. We’ll explore the benefits and limitations of online MBA’s, we’ll talk to the experts in the field and take a look at two online degree programs.

It’s no wonder online degree programs have gotten a bad rap. We’ve all been spammed with offers of degrees of any kind—high school diplomas, a Bachelor’s, a Master’s; a PhD. And for an extra fee, you can even graduate with honors, says Vicky Phillips, CEO of GetEducated.com—a website that evaluates accredited online degree programs. She says there are now more fake online MBA programs than real ones. “There are a lot of options to run into diploma mills and degree scams on the Internet, if they simply do a search on Yahoo or go to a college directory. Presently, GetEducated.com tracks over 200 of these. The two major indicators are either, (1) it isn’t accredited, or (2) it’s accredited by a bogus agency which is not recognized by The Council for Higher Education Accreditation. The third sign, which is quite common in diploma mills, is that they’re all free with a degree based solely on life experience—usually for a flat fee of about $2,000. You fax in your resume. They will award you a degree if you pay them a sum of money.”

Phillips says the first thing you can do to ensure that an online MBA program will give you a quality degree is check its accreditation. She says 130 business degree programs are accredited, and 48 of them, by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)—the most well-known accrediting association. Phillips says you can check out the school’s website, but… “The problem is many of the diploma mills are accredited, but by bogus agencies that they themselves operate. So, they need to know if it’s a valid accreditor. And they can also check that by going to The Council for Higher Education Accreditation. Its website lists the names of all recognized accreditors. They can download our free guidebook that’s just for finding graduate schools which has only accredited schools that have been screened, and we state the accreditation. They can submit a query to our free service, Diploma Mill Police, which will search that for them and answer the question.”

With so many online programs popping up, Phillips says close to 1 million fall to fake programs each year. “If they’re not accredited, then nobody from an outside agency has ever looked at their programs or procedures. And that should be a major red flag. And if they’re not accredited, the degree you earn will not be recognized. This is extremely important. It will not be recognized by other colleges or by employers. And, furthermore, in several states in the United States, it is illegal to get a job using a degree from an unaccredited university. So, it can constitute fraud—a criminal act.”

Another indicator of quality is the faculty. Who’s teaching the courses? That’s a good question to ask. At many business schools, the same professors that teach the day-time programs also teach the online courses. That way, you know you’re learning the same material, just in a different format. John Gallagher is Associate Dean for Executive MBA Programs at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. “Some business schools have a situation where they have a faculty that is in place primarily to do executive educations and executive MBA teaching that is not the same research faculty that is used to teach in their day-time program, their PhD programs, etc. So, there’s more of a reliance on outsiders; more of a reliance on adjunct instructors and those sorts of things. We vary, intentionally, with the point of view that we wanted the same faculty teaching in all of our programs. So, there is one set of standards. There’s one set of expectations. And there is not some variation in the content or the rigor across the various programs. The variation is in format.”

The Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University also offers an online degree. Carol Swanberg is Whitman’s Director of Admissions. She says there isn’t any difference from their online and day-time programs. “It’s the exact same curriculum and the same faculty that are teaching the classes. And the students actually earn the same degree. There isn’t any difference. You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between either student as far as a transcript.” That means that you won’t have a special mark on your degree that says “MBA Online” or “Executive MBA” or “Part-time MBA”. And this goes for all online MBA degrees. This can be a relief to some of you concerned about that stigma. Vicky Phillips says here’s another way to alleviate any concern about online degrees. “What our research has found nation-wide is that if you ask an employer if they would rather have somebody who attended a residential college or distance learning college, they will almost always say residential college. However, if you ask somebody whether they think a Duke University MBA is good. They’re going to say yes, regardless of how that degree is earned. So, what happens is employers prefer colleges; name brands that they know. It doesn’t matter to them. If they know the name brand and recognize it, then the stigma’s removed. It doesn’t matter to them how that degree was earned, because they respect that brand name. And what we found is that many employers like what we call “backyard brands”, in other words, schools whose names they’re familiar with and that operate within their geographic region. For example, if you live in California, you’re probably going to do very well with a California State University Online MBA—regardless of whether it was earned on campus or through distance learning.”

George Lorenzo is the author of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting your MBA Online”. He says online programs are designed so you can live as far as you’d like from the school you’re getting your degree from. But Lorenzo says keep in mind, there are programs that require you to attend some classes on campus. “There are, basically, two types. There’s fully online that you never have to go to that campus. You can do it from your home or your workplace, and never have to set foot on the campus that you’re enrolled in. Then there are online MBA programs that have residential requirements. And those vary from one institution to another. For instance, the Syracuse University MBA program has brief residential requirements. Arizona State University has an orientation, for instance, where you have to go to the campus before you actually start taking the courses in your curriculum. So, you have to be aware of those residential requirements. Regis University in Colorado, for instance, has a fully online program. University of Phoenix has a fully online program.”

Fuqua’s Cross-Continent Program is one that requires students to attend classes on site. John Gallagher: “The Cross-Continent Program is a residentially-based program that has an online component or support to it. But all students are required, at the beginning of each term, to be in residence for a full week before each term begins. They complete approximately half of the course work for that term while in residence for that week. And then, they complete the term working with their faculty and working with people who are assigned to their learning teams for an additional six weeks following that residency. We do this eight times during the degree process. So, there are eight terms. You might think of them as semesters or terms. There are eight of these meetings that occur. At each of those meetings, the students are taking two courses. It is a cohort-based, lock-step curriculum experience that all students in that class go through together. But there is an Internet-based support component to that that allows them to do an awful lot of the work from home without having to move permanently to Duke.”

The Whitman School of Management also requires time on campus. But they have a more flexible schedule. Carol Swanberg: “It’s a limited-residency program. It does require that students come to campus each semester that they’re registered. It’s at the beginning of each semester. They come to campus for five days and take classes with their classmates and their instructor where they’ll begin doing course work during that five-day period. And, usually, students are taking two classes at a time. So the time that they’re not in class, they are, generally, meeting with groups or starting group projects, or doing homework, and preparing for each class. And when the five-day period is finished, students go back to wherever they might live, and they do the rest of their course work online. And we use an online management system called “Blackboard”. They log in to this Blackboard system, and all their courses appear, and they’re able to go into those courses. And within those courses, faculty will use discussion threads and chat sessions. Or, they’ll record their day-time, full-time lecture and put that up digitally on this website. And students are expected to be active participants in that course.”

And what about pacing and a time line? Do students have to graduate together, or can they just go at their own pace? “They can go at their own pace. And we do have some students who might skip the semester because they have something going on that they know they’re not going to have the time to actually take a class. And, other times, people try to accelerate a little bit to try and finish up. The average student completes the program in three years which is typical for a part-time program. Some students finish a little bit under that, but other students who need to, can stretch it out. There’s a statute of limitations on completing the degree within seven years.”

One common fear people have about online programs is that since you do nearly all of your work online, you don’t form the same types of relationships or don’t make the same contacts as you would in a day-time program. But George says that you’d be surprised how people open up online. “I’ve talked to hundreds of students—hundreds—about, not only online MBA’s, but online degree programs in general. And they have formed many meaningful networks, and even relationships, with people that they’ve never physically met face to face. And it’s really amazing how people communicating online get to know each other quite well, actually. So, that argument that I always hear about how you have to be face to face doesn’t really hold a lot of weight to me. And I, myself, have started my own business and created a whole working environment around online communications. So, communicating online—to me—is just opening up broad vistas of networking that could never be done before the Internet.”

What about alumni networks? “That’s one place where I think online MBA programs are a little weak. But I think most of these programs are starting to realize that more and more, and they are trying to establish alumni networks for students who are all similarly taking online classes.”

Even though you can work at home, log on from anywhere at your convenience, online programs are by no means easy. In fact, because you have more freedom and time, these programs require a lot of self-discipline. Most people that get an online MBA do so because they have work commitments or families and can’t take two years off to go through a full-time on-site program. Fuqua’s John Gallagher says there are also some trade-offs. “Because they’re more focused on career enhancement than career switching, as you find in almost any executive MBA program, there’s going to be less of an emphasis on elective courses. So, in a day-time MBA program, it’s going to be possible to take a suite of elective courses that allow you to develop an in-depth focus or concentration. So, if a student’s particularly interested in developing a finance focus, or a marketing focus, or an operations focus, they have a very broad set of electives over a number of terms that allows them to build that particular area of expertise in depth. In an executive MBA program—and I mean almost any—there are a few exceptions. The electives are generally more limited, and they tend to focus less depth in any one particular functional area. So, again, the program is really designed for people that are more interested in enhancing their career as a general manager than as someone who is looking to switch careers and switch fields.”

For Karen Breinlinger, getting an online MBA from Whitman opened up new doors of opportunities. Listen how an online MBA worked for her. “It really wasn’t about getting a degree to necessarily advance my career salary-wise or level-wise. It was more about continuing my education. I’m a believer in life-long learning. And I thought I really wanted to continue and grow my knowledge, but not necessarily in human resources, which was the job I was in at the time. But I wanted a broader understanding of business so that I could provide better support to my business clients and, also, just to expand my future career options. I could have gone into a graduate program in human resources, but I didn’t necessarily want to be too narrowly focused. I think that the MBA certainly broadened my overall business understanding—even just simple things like the vocabulary or familiarity with the tools that my business clients use. It just enables me to interact with them at a higher level and at a different level. Because of my situation with being married with kids and tied to the local area, there really wasn’t an option for me to leave work and go full-time in a traditional program. So, I chose the independent-study MBA through Syracuse. I hadn’t yet completed my MBA when I was given the opportunity to move into the job I’m in now. Having been in human resources at the time for about eight years, if I hadn’t had the MBA, I probably wouldn’t have been considered for the job I’m in now. I’m currently the chief of staff for the president of product development which is, essentially, an administrative management job. I help him to make sure that the development organization runs smoothly, meets our strategic goals, supports our people and develops our people.”

There are 130 accredited online MBA programs says GetEducated.com’s, Vicky Phillips. So, you should know you have a lot of options, she says. “The options range. Of the 130 that we profile, you can pay anywhere from as little as $4,000 for an online MBA, or as much as almost $120,000. So, people have to ask what they are paying for, if there are 130 schools and that’s the price range. We strongly encourage people to shop around, because with 130 options, people really need to look at not only the cost, but what they’re buying for that amount of money. There’s a lot of variety.”

And author George Lorenzo says make sure you pick up that phone. “You can do your web surfing, and you can find loads of information online. But the bottom line is you need to call up people and talk to them. You need to ask questions. You need to develop a lot of questions that relate to your personal circumstances.”

For more information, advice, and to register for your weekly MBA podcast, visit mbapodcaster.com. This is MBA podcaster. Thanks for listening. And next time, we’ll talk about how you can sharpen those math skills before you begin your first year.

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http://www.chea.org/

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a private, nonprofit national organization that coordinates accreditation activity in the United States The CHEA is the largest institutional higher education membership organization in the United States with approximately 3,000 colleges and universities.

http://www.aacsb.edu/

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business is a not-for-profit corporation of educational institutions, corporations and other organizations devoted to the promotion and improvement of higher education in business administration and management. AACSB International is the premier accrediting agency for bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs in business administration and accounting.