Boston College Tried A Cohort-Based Part-Time MBA. It Was A ‘Total Disaster’

MIT Sloan School of Management is preparing to launch an Evening MBA built entirely around a mandatory, cohort-based schedule. At Boston College, the Carroll School of Management – which has the highest-ranked part-time MBA in New England, according to U.S. News – already ran that experiment, and abandoned it.

“We tried the cohort model because students said they wanted it,” Marilyn Eckelman, associate dean of graduate programs at Carroll, tells Poets&Quants. “It was a total disaster.” 

Part-time students, she says, routinely need to step away for a semester or more – for work travel, family obligations, or other disruptions – and a fixed cohort simply could not accommodate them. “People say, ‘I can’t make it, but I want to stay with the cohort,’” Eckelman says. “But you can’t do that.”

A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMPETITOR

 

MIT Sloan announced its Evening MBA on July 15, becoming the third M7 school to offer a working-professional program – a move certain to disrupt the Boston-area’s rich part-time landscape. The program is built around two in-person evenings a week for 22 months with a cohort that starts and finishes together, the same structure Carroll tried and scrapped. Eckelman is careful not to dismiss the threat outright, but she does draw a sharp distinction between Sloan’s model and her own program’s core selling point: flexibility. “What we promote is flexibility. We promote, you know, at your convenience,” she says. “The cohort model to me is a little bit – there’s a different kind of student that makes that commitment.”

She points to Sloan’s willingness to admit candidates with less work experience than its full-time program requires as a further sign the two programs may be drawing from different pools. “I think it’s a different kind of student,” she says. “It remains to be seen. It could be terrific.”

The stakes are real regardless of how the applicant pools sort themselves out. Carroll’s part-time MBA climbed to No. 16 in the 2026 U.S. News Part-Time MBA ranking, up from No. 23 two years ago – a run that puts it first not only in Boston, well ahead of crosstown rivals Boston University and Northeastern, but in all of New England. Asked whether an MIT-branded entrant changes the calculus around that momentum, Eckelman acknowledges the prestige gap but leans on Carroll’s track record with the employers its part-time students already work for. 

Moreover, Carroll’s Jesuit identity plays a role in how it positions itself against competitors, Eckelman says.

“One of the attractions that we are to candidates is anybody who’s had a Jesuit undergrad or went to Jesuit school, high school,” she says. “I hear that a lot.” The school, she adds, builds a community service requirement into all of its programs.

‘STICK TO OUR KNITTING’

Eckelman frames Carroll’s broader strategy as deliberately narrow. 

“One of the things that we’ve tried here to do at BC is kind of stick to our knitting,” she says, describing the program as “a general management MBA with a focus on data analytics at its core.” Rather than layering on new degree formats to chase enrollment, she says, Carroll has concentrated on strengthening its existing full-time and part-time tracks, backed by what she calls one of the strongest finance departments in the region.

That focus extends to who the part-time program is built for. With roughly 500 to 600 part-time students moving through Carroll at any given time, Eckelman says the pool draws heavily from consulting, financial services, and life sciences firms clustered in and around Boston – professionals looking to move up rather than switch fields entirely. 

“They’re looking for ‘How do I grow in business? How do I get promoted?’” she says.

INTERNATIONAL ENROLLMENT, HOLDING STEADY

In Carroll’s incoming full-time class, international enrollment sits at 20% this fall, down only slightly from 21% a year earlier and below a historical high of 27%, Eckelman says. 

She attributes broader admissions headwinds – a shrinking pool of prospective students, rising costs, and tightening federal rules on how long international students may remain in the U.S. after graduation – to pressures facing graduate business programs generally, not to any pullback specific to Carroll. And she says the cap is partly a function of employer expectations. 

“If I want to bring in a class of 80 to 100, I have a limit, because I can’t go to employers and say I’m 60%, 70% international – they ask at this point,” she says. Rather than lean on international enrollment to boost test scores, she says Carroll opts for a more holistic admissions read: “That’s not our goal. We look at students holistically: What have they done?”

ETHICS RETURNS TO THE CURRICULUM

Eckelman says Carroll is working to reintroduce a standalone ethics component into its MBA curriculum, a move she ties directly to the current moment. 

“I just think given the time that we’re in, what could be more timely?” she says. The school already embeds artificial intelligence across 17 existing MBA courses, she adds, rather than standing up a separate AI-specific track.

And on return on investment, a question Eckelman says is now top of mind for nearly every prospective student, she describes the MBA as fundamentally “a transition degree” – its value resting less on any single number than on whether it moves a student meaningfully closer to a role or industry they could not otherwise reach. Students who arrive with a fixed idea of what they want, she suggests, tend to get less out of the experience than those who come in open to discovering it.

“I was always amazed when people say, ‘Oh my god, I don’t have any quantitative skills,'” she says. “And then they come in and say, ‘I love this class,’ or, ‘Oh my God, so-and-so wants to interview me for a job.’ It’s like, ‘I didn’t realize I love this so much.'”

DON’T MISS MIT’S EVENING MBA IS ABOUT TO SHAKE UP ONE OF THE COUNTRY’S MOST LUCRATIVE PART-TIME MARKETS

© 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.