Incredible Iowa: How The Tippie College Got Back In The Game After Ending Its Full-Time MBA

Timing is everything. When the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business announced six and a half years ago that it would end its full-time MBA program, its plan was to redirect resources from a program that had suffered for years from dwindling enrollment and declining rankings, focusing more on the college’s highly regarded part-time MBA, a new pair of specialized master’s programs, and — crucially — a new online MBA.

In fall 2018, Tippie would launch its Master of Finance and Master of Business Analytics degrees; the following fall it launched the online MBA. And a few months after that, the world imploded.

The coronavirus pandemic shut down college campuses across the globe in March 2020, shifting instruction online for those programs that had the capacity. And that’s when Iowa Tippie’s investment in programs that provide students with more flexibility began to really pay off: The college’s online MBA took off like a rocket. It’s shown no signs of coming back to Earth.

50% GROWTH & PLANS FOR 50% MORE

Tippie’s decision to redirect resources from its struggling full-time MBA program could not have worked out better. “The projections that we had had in terms of growth were 40 students an intake in August (2019) and January and May (2020), and we were hitting those numbers exactly as we expected,” says Amy Kristof-Brown, who has taught at Tippie since 1997 and who was senior associate dean when the decision was made to end Tippie’s full-time MBA. She became the college’s dean, taking over from Sarah Gardial, in December 2020. “And then once Covid hit and we went into the summer of ’20, we took in 200 students in that intake. So that certainly escalated things more rapidly.”

The initial burst of interest during Covid leveled off, but it never faded. In 2021, the college merged its part-time and online MBA programs; since then the Iowa MBA has seen 50% growth, according to school enrollment data, with another 50% anticipated by 2027. Meanwhile, Tippie’s MBA has earned consistent praise among peers as well as in the rankings, landing at No. 34 in Poets&Quants‘ 2023 ranking of Best Online MBA Programs, its first appearance on the annual list.

Tippie’s current online MBA student population is now over 1,500 students, up from 700 in 2021. It is no longer a small, regional program that draws students from a limited geographic area: Tippie is bucking that trend, too, by attracting students from 48 U.S. states and six countries. Current students have come to the program from more than 800 companies in Iowa and over 1,300 across the U.S.

FLEXIBLE, AFFORDABLE, ACCESSIBLE

The initial rapid growth had a simple spark: “We had a lot of working professional students who were driving into locations, physical locations, to take their classes with us, and many of those students switched to the online version,” Kristof-Brown tells Poets&Quants. “They really liked it. It was more flexible. And so I think that plus Covid gave us our initial boost in numbers, and now I think the reputation has just grown dramatically.”

Moreover, “We weren’t building something from scratch. We started with a heavily competent staff who knew how to work with MBA students and with master’s students, and so they stepped into that space and all of those programs are running right now pretty much at full capacity.”

At bottom, Kristof-Brown says, credit for the program’s continued growth in size and reputation goes to the school’s guiding principles: flexibility, affordability — the whole program costs under $34,000 — and “an unwavering focus on student success.” Tippie’s program has 58 online courses as of spring 2024, a number  that will rise to 64 this year and get close to 70 by 2025. It is a high-touch program, with options to attend in-person classes or be entirely online, emphasizing connections between fellow students and professors, and with multiple experiential elements, some involving global travel. And it boasts small class sizes — never more than 39 students, Kristof-Brown says.

A reputation for constant innovation doesn’t hurt. Partnering with Iowa’s Distance and Online Education group, Tippie redevelops classes on a three-year cycle in its on-campus studio space. Courses have a standard design, which allows for student engagement and learning, as well as scaling while maintaining small class sizes of fewer than 40. Options to specialize abound: The Iowa MBA features a dozen certificates, developed in partnership with industry partners, in everything from Business Analytics to Finance to Marketing; new certificates were recently launched in Innovation, Responsible Resource Management, Investment Management, and more, with three more in the planning stages. More certificate offerings — designed to serve as building blocks within the Iowa MBA and off-campus Master of Business Analytics (a fully online version of the MSBA was launched in Fall 2022, and several new certificates for that program are now in development) — mean students can upskill quickly, Kristof-Brown says.

“We have a great program that I think combines a lot of flexibility, that is affordable, and that is accessible,” she says.

HOW TIPPIE ATTRACTS, AND KEEPS, STUDENTS

That last part — accessibility — is key. “We don’t have a very high cutoff rate when we let people in,” Kristof-Brown says. “We’re letting a lot of people in. I was looking at Indiana’s program today, what is their acceptance rate, like 28%? Ours is more like 80%. So we have a lot of people who really want to change from a non-business degree in their undergrad work to go to a business degree. And so we’re making that opportunity available for a lot of people. I think they’re very pleased with it.

“And the other thing we’ve done that I’m really proud of and I think is important is, online programs can seem very impersonal. And so we have worked really hard to keep a very personal feel to the program. As soon as someone contacts us, we follow up immediately with a person who then immediately links the student with the person that’s going to be their adviser, who’s going to work with them for the entire time that they’re in the program.”

The result: a retention rate over 90%.

“I think a lot of that has to do with the personal touch, with feeling like somebody is working with you as you go through the program and working to help you do it, or at least navigate it. They’re not doing work for you, but they’re helping you navigate,” Kristof-Brown says.

“We just had a session with some of our students at our advisory board meeting last spring and they just raved about the advising and the people who were there. The faculty are great, and they say that time and time again, but they also just kept calling out the staff that were working with them to help them navigate this program. And that I think makes a huge difference for us.”

Essential to Tippie’s initial success in the online space was the retention of faculty, including adjunct faculty, and staff during the shuttering of the full-time MBA. Essential to its continued success, says Jennifer Blackhurst, associate dean for graduate management programs, has been a “reimagining” of staff structures to find ways to best support students.

“Even with the significant growth of our student body,” Blackhurst tells P&Q, “our programs continue to offer a personal touch and attention to our students.” Tippie has dedicated career services and student experiences teams that works closely together. Every grad student has a planning meeting with their student experience adviser and all receive individual career services and coaching. The school also offers specialized orientations, including mini-modules that serves as primers in certain topic areas.

‘IT’S A MASSIVE INVESTMENT FOR THEM — AND WE UNDERSTAND THAT’

What Blackhurst is most proud of is what she considers the school’s top draw: Its guiding principle of always putting the student first, “making sure that we’re offering them a product and giving them an experience that can transform their lives, their careers, the future for their families.”

She notes that in a recent survey the school asked alumni, “Why did you pick to get an online degree?” The top responses: “To better position myself for the future” and “To increase my salary.” “We constantly track: Are you being promoted, are you moving into a new function? And so we’re seeing students be able to realize their hopes and dreams in entering and completing this program,” Blackhurst says. In the survey, nearly 70% reported earning a promotion and nearly 40% said they were able to move into different functions during the program or immediately after graduation.

Flexibility is key — but flexibility can mean different things for different programs and people, she says.

“So it’s defining what the flexibility means for us and our students,” Blackhurst says. “It’s not flexibility in terms of, you never have to go to a synchronous class and interact with anyone. That’s not our flexibility. Our flexibility is offering students the ability to start, to pause when they’re in a big life event and to create the concentration areas or certificates that fits their needs and their projected career needs and really making the program their own within the system that we’ve built.”

These efforts have positively impacted both yield and retention, Blackhurst says. “Because we all understand this is an investment — a major investment, a major sacrifice of their time, of tuition that they’re paying. Some may get coverage from companies, others might not. It’s time away from their families. So it’s a massive investment for them. And we understand that and we want it to be worthwhile for them.”

Q&A WITH IOWA TIPPIE DEAN AMY KRISTOF-BROWN

P&Q: The timing of the launch of the online MBA and the pandemic hitting: Is it too simplistic to say that that timing is part of the reason why it’s so successful now, because just as people’s awareness of online MBAs was growing, you guys were there waiting?

Amy Kristof-Brown: Well, I think the timing certainly helped. The projections that we had had in terms of growth were 40 students an intake in August and January and May, and we were hitting those numbers exactly as we expected. And then once Covid hit and we kind of went into summer of ’20, we took in 200 students in that intake. So that certainly escalated things more rapidly. But then we saw that bubble sort of die down a little bit, and I think that people did get aware of the program and the fact that we were out there and more people knew about it. We’re in 48 of 50 states right now, six different countries. So that’s not just Covid and that’s not people transferring from physical spaces to others.

Back in May 2023, you talked about how the Iowa MBA had 700 students; now, less than a year later, you’re at 1,500. That a huge explosion — more than double what it was in less than a year.

Amy Kristof-Brown: We’ve had more students shifting to online. It used to be in-person, so that is part of that. But we weren’t starting from complete zero in terms of numbers of students when we launched the program. We have students in our other programs that started taking the online classes, and I think that did give us an early boost in that program.

But what we were surprised about when we went to fully online because of Covid, we expected when we came back to the classroom that we would go back to our numbers we had had previously, where we had people coming into class and we never got more than I would say 40% of our students going back to in-person. We hit that peak and then it dropped immediately back down, and now we’re at less than 10% of our students are taking classes in-person. We combine the in-person and the online, so we just call it the Iowa MBA, and students can take it however they want, but they are vastly gravitating toward the online offerings that we’re providing.

Guiding principles for you have been flexibility and affordability, as well as what you call “an unwavering focus on student success.” Can you elaborate on that? It’s not just “high-touch” while they’re in the program. You have quite an impressive careers office, too.

Amy Kristof-Brown: Yeah, we’re doing a lot to try to carry our students through every stage of the process. And I think part of the rationale for that — I think you know our backstory, that we closed our full-time MBA program, we announced it in 2017, we closed it in 2019, we kept all of our staff for that program. That was one of our commitments that we had made to the staff. We made the announcement and said that they would all have positions with us. And so what we did was, we basically pivoted the people who had been serving a very small group of full-time students to serving our online students. And so we’ve got folks in careers. We’ve got the advising, which I think is really among the best. Those are the folks that kind of help you every step of the way about pacing and pricing, sequencing of classes, and what’s a good combination of certificates for different career plans. And that all goes through our advisers as well as our careers office, and a lot of people in the admissions side as well that really talk with people immediately.

So you’re not going to get a chat bot or just something impersonal. You’re going to get a person that calls you on the phone and says, “It seems like you’re interested in the program. What questions can I answer for you?” And I think that’s pulled people in and I think it keeps them feeling like they have a partner who’s helping them work toward their success. So that’s been a big part of it.

The other thing we’ve done is — because we know that we do get a lot of career changers, and we get people who are coming back saying, “I want to do something different” who may not have a business undergraduate degree — we have created what we call mini modules, and they’re almost tutoring sessions that are set up to help give you, not tutoring because it’s not live, but more like a primer on certain topic areas. So a primer on financial accounting, a primer on teamwork skills, those kinds of things to help bolster people’s skills as they’re coming into the program. If you’re taking a communication class and you haven’t had a communication course yet and you suddenly have to give your first PowerPoint presentation, we’ve got something for you that you can access to look at to help you do that in a way that’s going to help you be successful. So I think all of those things are geared towards helping the students succeed.

It really is a remarkable arc for the school, isn’t it, from 2017 with losing the MBA program and then just a revival, in the sense that it didn’t have to go this way. You could be completely off the map right now, but instead it’s the opposite.

Amy Kristof-Brown: We could be, but we did our research and we didn’t make decisions without knowing where we were going. I was on the leadership team when we made the decision, but our dean at the time, Sarah Gardial, was the one who made a final decision. And we’d been looking at the numbers for years and they were telling us that we should probably stop the full-time program. And one of her big beliefs was that we shouldn’t stop something until we knew what we were going to do instead. And I leaned heavily into that as well. Like I said, we made promises to the staff that we were going to keep them all. We made promises to the faculty that everybody would certainly be retained, and that included our adjunct faculty. So we planfully did it at a time when we were ready to step into the other programs.

And so we launched our on-campus specialty master’s in analytics and finance in 2018, and then we launched the online program in 2019. And between the programs, we were able to accommodate all of the staff and all of the faculty who had previously worked in the program and make sure that they all had positions. And I think we weren’t building something from scratch. We started with a heavily competent staff who knew how to work with MBA students and with master’s students, and so they stepped into that space and all of those programs are running right now pretty much at full capacity. We’re starting to look at growing the program for next year in the online space, but we have to do that with some faculty additions before we can step into that.

And now the target is 50% growth by 2027.

Amy Kristof-Brown: That’s what we’re going to try.

Q&A WITH IOWA TIPPIE ASSOCIATE DEAN JENNIFER BLACKHURST

P&Q: What is the secret to Tippie’s success in the online MBA space? 

Jennifer Blackhurst: We came from a place of having a very nice PMBA, a part-time MBA program. And then we had originally planned on launching, which we did, an online program in fall of 2019, with the plan for it never to be really above about 200 and some students once we got it to steady state.

Then Covid happened. And so having all of that lined up actually worked to our advantage, because then we were able to scale quickly what we were doing in that online space. And so we made a deliberate decision that we’re going to have synchronous sessions in all of our classes that the actual professors lead, and we cap our class size so that we are never giving up that really high-touch environment, even with the growth. And then I think probably the last thing is that we have a high level of flexibility, and we are very, very affordable.

It’s an incredible arc, from 2017 to today.

Jennifer Blackhurst: It really is. It’s been so exciting to be a part of it. And we have the full support of Amy, our dean, but also I cannot say enough great things about the staff behind the scenes. So professors, faculty of course loving these one-on-one experiences with our students, bonding with the students, creating connections. But behind the scenes, I’m going to call it the well-oiled machine of everything that we do is to support our students to make sure that they’re successful. And again, it is very, very high-touch. We are meeting with, we’re talking with, every student that comes in. We’re getting them set up with an adviser wanting to set up appointments. There’s career services options, there’s all these co-curricular things.

So you’re right, it’s been incredible to be a part of it. And it’s also been incredible seeing how all of this happens with a team and a team being really dedicated and understanding the mission and having the mission be supporting students.

A lot of that team has been there for this whole ride since 2017, and even before, right? They’ve been there for the whole journey.

Jennifer Blackhurst: They’ve been there for the whole journey. They’ve adapted, we’ve changed processes, changed roles, reshuffled. But again, what always grounds us through any of that change is what is best for our students.

Tell us about the curriculum. Among other elements, there are six new certificates to make for 12 total certificates and more in the planning stages. So that’s quite a breadth of possible certificates.

Jennifer Blackhurst: It is, and yeah, that’s one of the things that we’re really proud of. Those 12 certificates with more on the horizon come from, today we have fifty-eight online courses by spring 2024, it’s going to be sixty-four different online courses and plans to get close to 70 by 2025.

And this isn’t an unconstrained growth and just adding, just to add — it is a careful consideration serving our students. What do they want? Talking to our employers who review as partners, what are they looking for? What is the next skillset that they need from their employees? Leveraging our boards in all of the different areas and really leaning heavily on the departments and their expertise.

I’m going to call them functional certificates. You could get a certificate in marketing and you could get a certificate in finance to really expanding that to more cross-functional certificates. And we still have a certificate in marketing, and that’s great for a deep dive in marketing.

But one example is our accounting advisory board went to the department and said, “You really need something around sustainability and responsibly managing resources.” And so we’re like, “OK, we hear you,” and we now have a responsible research management certificate. But it’s not all accounting courses. It’s the courses that make sense that are cross-disciplinary because business is cross-disciplinary, not just in one function. So that cross-disciplinary nature, I’m really, really proud of.

You talk about flexibility, that’s the ultimate in flexibility, right?

Jennifer Blackhurst: Yep, exactly.

Not being hemmed in. You take a certificate in finance, for example, and there’s a lot of things that can fall into that umbrella.

Jennifer Blackhurst: Yes, and that’s a big part of whatever we put together, how it kind of ties back to that ecosystem of everybody behind the scenes. So we meet with students: “Tell me your career goals. Tell me where you’re at right now. Tell me about projects that you have coming up and let me advise you on a set of classes that you might want to take or this certificate that could really help you get to that next level where that you want to switch functional areas or you want a promotion that you see coming down the way in your company.” And so we’re really able to focus that flexibility and almost customization on, “Hey student, this is what’s really going to work specifically for you.” Students can get more than one certificate. Students can come back as alums to add on to get new skill sets.

What percentage of the courses have an experiential element? 

Jennifer Blackhurst: We’ve really tried to focus those efforts in our capstone offering. So we’ve designed our capstones around three different options. And in those cases we are having students work within their own companies, within their own teams pulling things in.

Now a student could come in and say, “I want you to help me identify a company to work with. That is few and far between, because as you know, these are all working professionals.” And so we’re really excited: “Okay, we’re going to do an experiential class and you are going to do it within your company.” This is going to highlight or shine a light on your skill set. You’re going to be able to do something great for your company. And so it’s just a win-win. So it’s a huge part of what we do really focused in that capstone area.

The bottom line is that students who come out of this program are excelling in their careers: In a recent survey, 70% reported getting a promotion right after the program and almost 40% moved into different functions. Word gets around about a program like that.

Jennifer Blackhurst: You’re right, we constantly track, are you being promoted, are you moving into a new function. We might have some career changes, but the last survey that we did was super interesting for us because we were able to ask our alums, Why did you pick to get an online degree? And they’re saying things like “To better position myself for the future, to increase my salary.” And so we’re seeing students be able to realize their hopes and dreams in entering this program.

Because we all understand this is an investment — a major investment, a major sacrifice of their time, of tuition that they’re paying. Some may get coverage from companies, others might not. It’s time away from their families. So it’s a massive investment for them. And we understand that and we want it to be worthwhile for them.

DON’T MISS IOWA TIPPIE TO END FULL-TIME MBA PROGRAM and THE P&Q INTERVIEW: IOWA TIPPIE DEAN ON THE FLEXIBLE, STACKABLE FUTURE OF BUSINESS EDUCATION