$10K For An MBA? This Silicon Valley B-School Aims To Be The Ultimate Disruptor

Dr. Nick Ladany built his team at the nonprofit San Francisco Bay University on what he calls “a healthy disgruntlement with higher education.” The result, after three years, is a $10,000 price tag – for an entire MBA.

The Fremont, California-based, WASC-accredited school today (July 16) launches MBA Pro+, an online MBA built around faculty-developed AI avatars that deliver instruction while human faculty shift into mentorship and career-advising roles.

NO FOOTBALL, NO BASKETBALL, NO $85K TUITION

Ladany says the price wasn’t the starting point – it was the output of a cost model. “We really looked at what could we do, what could we provide at an expense or at a cost where we would be net positive,” he tells Poets&Quants. “And then we scaled up from that.”

He’s blunt about where the savings come from.

“I think universities have moved into a for-profit mindset in order to be successful in areas where they’ve not had to constrain themselves,” he says. “We do not have athletics. We don’t have football, basketball. You have all these universities – how they’re spending millions – and students spend at least 10% of their tuition, no matter the institution. That’s 10% we don’t have to pay.”

‘THE BEST VERSION OF THE BEST FACULTY’

The centerpiece of MBA Pro+ is Bayley, SFBU’s proprietary AI system, paired with faculty-developed AI avatars that deliver course content. Ladany draws a distinction between MBA Pro+ and the AI-avatar models some other schools have piloted, where a professor’s likeness delivers a static, pre-recorded lecture.

“Ours actually do interactions with the students,” he says. “They’re responsive. They are built on that model, but we can customize our MBA. So if a company, for example, like IBM, wanted a customizable MBA, we can do that on the fly. We can use examples from IBM in those – I wouldn’t even call them lectures, but mini interactions.”

He describes the avatars as delivering “kind of the best version of the best faculty,” while human faculty move into what he calls the “guide on the side” role – mentoring, building community, and career advising, rather than lecturing. “Rather than replacing faculty, we’re really redeploying faculty,” he says.

Where does the line fall between Bayley and a human faculty member? “Bayley’s kind of the backbone for it,” Ladany says, “but it is the avatars of the faculty that are teaching. There may be an AI boss – an avatar boss – that’s not the faculty, but you’re just learning from that person.”

That “avatar boss” shows up in what Ladany points to as the program’s signature exercise. Students first learn a negotiation framework – he cites Harvard Business School’s model as the industry standard – then “have to engage with an avatar boss and negotiate for a salary increase. They immediately get feedback, efficiency, and can try it again if they didn’t do well until they get it right.”

A 20-TO-1 – OR 50-TO-1 – MENTOR RATIO

The initial student-to-faculty-mentor ratio will run “somewhere initially in the 20 to one to – it could be 50 to one,” Ladany says, varying by how much interaction an individual student wants. “Some students want the interaction, but there are some students who may say, ‘Look, I just want the MBA, I don’t want to be doing all this.’ So they can do that. There’s nothing wrong with that. I think education has been so cookie-cutter that we feel that’s one of our big things – make it personal, make it personalized.”

He’s adamant that flexibility doesn’t mean lowered standards. “I think our program is going to be more rigorous than any other MBA out there,” he says. “But the difference is our students will have the opportunity to learn. It won’t be, if you’re not doing well, get out of here. If you’re not doing well, we’re going to work with you to get better.”

ENROLLMENT: ‘A FEW THOUSAND STUDENTS’ WITHIN YEARS

SFBU expects to enroll up to 100 students per monthly cohort starting in September, “up to three, 400 by the end of the year.” From there: “Within a year, have 1,000 plus, and then maybe in a few years, we’ll have a few thousand students.” Ladany says that growth trajectory extends beyond the MBA to SFBU’s undergraduate programs as well.

The curriculum is organized around 45 competencies and behavioral indicators, which Ladany says SFBU developed internally as part of a broader redesign of the university’s core curriculum, then sent to employers nationally to validate. “We came up with a series of behavioral indicators and competencies, and we sent them out to employers nationally to find out: are these the kind of skills you want people to graduate college to have?” he says. “It’s liberal arts, largely, but most universities say they’re liberal arts institutions without really defining what that means. What we’re saying is: here’s how we’re defining it.”

On outcomes reporting, Ladany commits to transparency: “This has got to be data-informed. Now, we’re also going to learn that we’re not doing some things right, and when we find that out, we need to pivot. We’re not going to be arrogant enough to say, whatever we do, we’re going to keep doing it, even if it’s bad.”

HOW $10,000 STACKS UP

MBA Pro+’s all-in price undercuts even the most affordable end of the online MBA market, let alone the traditional two-year residential degree. It looks especially thrifty in comparison to traditional, full-time MBA programs at the most elite institutions, where total two-year tuition runs close to $200K and additional costs push that number closer to $300K. Two years of tuition alone cost around $184K at Wharton, $175K at Stanford GSB, $173K at Northwestern Kellogg and MIT Sloan, and $157K at Harvard Business School.

SFBU’s program looks like a deal compared to schools outside the M7, too. Mid-tier, well-regarded full-time programs – the kind that have long placed graduates solidly in industry and consulting roles without the Ivy League price tag – still run well into six figures for out-of-state students. Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business runs about $122,000 in total tuition over two years, followed by Rochester’s Simon Business School at around $115,000, Indiana’s Kelley School of Business at about $111,000, and Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business at roughly $102,000. Georgia’s Terry College of Business is the least expensive of the five, still totaling around $73,000. Even at the affordable end of the traditional MBA market, MBA Pro+ undercuts the price by 85% or more.

Apples to oranges? Perhaps. The cost for a degree at five premier online MBA programs, per Poets&Quants‘ own 2026 Online MBA Ranking: Carnegie Mellon Tepper’s Online Hybrid MBA runs about $150K, USC Marshall’s is $140K, UNC Kenan-Flagler’s is $125K, Indiana’s Kelley Direct is $95K, and the University of Texas at Dallas’ Jindal program runs about $58K in-state or $96K out-of-state.

SFBU isn’t the only outfit challenging the price of an MBA, or the definition of one. Abilitie, the leadership-development company behind The 12-Week MBA, offers a $4,500 part-time certificate program combining live faculty-led simulations with an in-person capstone weekend, credentialed through St. Edward’s University’s Bill Munday School of Business. Unlike MBA Pro+, Abilitie’s offering isn’t an accredited master’s degree – it’s marketed explicitly as a certificate alternative for professionals who want business acumen without the time or cost of a full MBA, and its founder, Bjorn Billhardt, has said the company sees itself less as competing with business schools than serving the roughly 99% of managers who never got an MBA in the first place.

FROM NPU TO SFBU

MBA Pro+ arrives three years into a broader overhaul Ladany has led since joining SFBU – which until 2021 operated as Northwestern Polytechnic University. As NPU, the school drew scrutiny in past years, including a 2016 Buzzfeed report describing it as a “visa mill” and a subsequent accreditor compliance warning tied to student job-placement data.

SFBU moved from national to WASC Senior College and University Commission regional accreditation and rebranded from NPU to SFBU in 2021. Ladany describes inheriting a university with “an interesting past” but substantial resources – he cites a roughly $300 million unrestricted fund – and being asked to “build a university from scratch.” 

His approach: hire people with that aforementioned healthy disgruntlement, then rebuild from there. Among the changes he lists: capping class sizes at 20 for all students, building out full academic wraparound services, and training faculty in pedagogy for the first time. “The dirty little secret of higher education: faculty have never been trained in how to teach,” he says. “No other labor force in the world – except, someone told me recently, politicians – has a job where they have no training.”

MBA Pro+’s inaugural cohort begins September 1. Learn more about the program here.

DON’T MISS CAN A $5,000 MINI-MBA CHALLENGE THE SIX-FIGURE DEGREE? ABILITIE THINKS SO

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.