Backstage With Auburn, Washington Foster, SMU Cox & Minnesota Carlson’s Online MBA

Paccar Hall at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. UW photo

Allen: Thank you. And I know a lot of our readers really care about looking at class profiles and the type of students that you are all are admitting. But before we jump into that, I just want to remind the panelists here that you can type in any questions into the chat, and we’ll try to get to those by the end. If you have any specific questions that you want to be answered, just feel free to type those in. But let’s go back around to the circle now, back to Jodey. Tell me a little bit about the class profile, the class makeup at Washington Foster’s hybrid MBA. How it was a few years ago, whenever you first got going and then how it is now.

Farwell: You bet. And it’s not much different than it was when it started. It’s mid-career working professionals with about eight years of work experience. Our GMAT score averages around 624, 3.4 GPA. We’re lucky that we get 40% women in our program. We have 10% military and hoping that goes up. We also have 30% of our students hold advanced degrees, which is, super exceptional, they’re elite group of students. And I think the one thing that I really love most about our program is that 40% of our students actually live outside of the state of Washington. It creates for such a huge networking opportunity for the students and then that just continues. I always kid around with my staff that my goal is to paint the United States purple so that we get a student from every state.

Allen: Very cool. And Jim, the class now at Auburn and how that might have been changing, how that’s changed over the past five or so years?

Parrish: Great question. It’s changed a lot, I think, in the last four or five years. And probably changed a lot in the last five months based on some things that we did. But our goal with our programs is to really focus on excellence and access. And I would say if you looked at classes previously, to fall 2020, we’re increasing our GMAT average as our online program became a very desirable place for students to choose. And you could see the GMAT average continue to go up and up and up as a more competitive student was choosing that program. In March, there was a lot of changes that took place in terms of students being able to get access, to take a GMAT or GRE. We looked at implementing some emergency waivers because there were goals that students had and we still wanted them to be able to achieve their goals. We looked at a lot of data. We looked at some things about students who were successful in our program with certain scores. And we also looked at some other qualitative data to make some decisions about where waivers would go into place. Our average GMAT did hold true. There were just less submissions of those this year. GMAT average was around 600 for the last academic year in the online MBA. The GPA was almost identical at about 3.3 coming in from undergraduate. And we also had about six and a half years of work experience with our profile. There’s some interesting data to look at, and it will be great to come through later in terms of this incoming class and the 185 that are starting this fall. Really get a look at that and see what it looks like without that other data. I would say that we’re well represented in the Southeastern United States, knowing that our brand is really established there. But we’re also expanding to the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast, and California, as a matter of fact. I think the Harbert name, the Auburn brand is growing in those different places. We’re seeing different types of industry and we’re working on partnerships with different companies and organizations where the Auburn MBA is the choice for their employees as an MBA. Our profile is pretty steady this year. It is a little bit different based on the number of GMATS that we do have subscribing. But I’m very excited about the class that’s coming in because I think there’s some opportunities that people took knowing that this was a year that there were some situations that are outside of their control, but they want to continue on and reach their goals they had set for themselves. We set some of those reviews for the GMAT consideration.

Allen: Great. Thank you. And Natalie, what’s the class looking like now at Carlson?

Dillon: Online, since it’s rolled from part-time distance to online has found a really unique spot in terms of profile between our other MBA formats. Currently, our online program sits really nicely between our part-time and our executive profile. As you look at our average student, our bread and butter area of work experience is about seven to 12 years of work experience coming into the program. Sits right in that middle, as my colleagues have said, of middle-level work experience, possibly a middle-level manager, maybe upper-level manager that needs that flexibility for an online delivery. We also see a good chunk of our students come to the program that have previous education or master’s degrees and are looking to add on that business acumen to move up into leadership and upper-level management positions. Similar to Jim, we have had a GMAT GRE waiver process in place for quite a while that looks at a variety of different areas. We see a good chunk of GMAT and GRE scores come in, but it’s not across all of our candidates. I always use more of the work experience and average age and undergrad as much more of a view of the profile versus the GMAT or GRE. We sit really comfortably though at about a 620 GMAT score, again, a 3.4 undergrad GPA, but really that work experience, I think, shows kind of the profile of this type of student we’re seeing coming into the program. The other two parts of our online program that are extremely proud for us as a school is that we have an extremely high percentage of women that our program actually is the highest percentage of the four MBA format. We’re pushing almost 40% women in our program. And then we’re almost at 18% military students. We do have a really great partnership as well as wonderful network just with the military community. And we’ve seen that across our MBA platforms and formats. Exactly, to also my colleague’s standpoint, geography location-wise, we do see a good chunk of students coming from the Midwest region, Minnesota being our largest. We usually see about 30% of our students coming from within the state. Our next largest chunk still come from the Midwest region of Illinois and Wisconsin, but we’ve also seen some larger growing pockets in the Western region as well as in the South. Currently, you’re seeing about a 50/50 split of students coming from the Midwest and 50% from other regions of the United States. The other part I really love is seeing the mixture of what functional areas people are coming from. We do see across all these different industries and sector, military government, a lot of engineering background, a lot of medical industry background, but we’re also seeing a good rise, especially in the tech and computer science area because of the analytics electives that we’re offering as well. Really interesting diverse groups. When you get into the classroom, you’re just learning from your faculty. But you’re also gonna learn from these other diverse students that you’re having a conversation with, too.

Allen: Excellent. Thank you. And Jillian, how’s it looking now at Southern Methodist and the online MBA?

Melton: I think I’ll echo a lot of the similar comments that my colleagues have made. That’s kind of the hard part of going number four. I won’t go through all the same details, but one thing that I really wanna point out too about SMU Cox that I think is so important to us and similar to what my colleagues have said is just the diversity of the class. And one of the ways that we look at that is companies represented. We’ll be starting 100, we have 103 students starting this fall in the online MBA program and we have 98 companies represented. That’s something that we’re immensely proud of because like we’ve talked about, you’re gonna be learning so much from your peers, from those small class sizes, from your groups, that you want to make sure that you’re learning from people from different industries. And of course, a lot of our students are coming from Dallas and Texas, and Texas is a huge state. It’s no surprise I think to anybody that that’s where the majority of our students come from. But we also have 19 States represented throughout the program. And a couple of individuals who are located overseas as well. We’re bringing lots of different perspectives. In terms of other areas of diversity, we do have students representing four branches of the military, average age, and years of work experience. It sounds like it’s gonna be fairly similar to my colleagues really in that mid-level career, career spot. Right around eight years or so. And then in terms of academic background, GMAT/GRE score, I get it, sounds like we’re all fairly comparable. But I think one thing that we’d all agree on too, is that we’re really looking at that work experience and what you’re gonna be bringing to the class. One thing that I always want to tell students too, is that we don’t have any magic computer that kind of like sifts through the applications. We’re all reading your applications. We want to get to know candidates and know students. It’s really too about what your background is, what you’re gonna be bringing to the class, and then what you want to get out of it. Because we are looking for a lot of different things in our MBA profile.