West Texas A&M University’s Online MBA

West Texas A&M is no stranger to the online delivery of business education. Classes have been offered online as far back as 1998, though back then, says Dr. Neil Terry, dean of the College of Business and professor of economics, the online MBA program was little more than a “glorified correspondence course.”

Terry has a unique perspective on West Texas’ online MBA: 1998 was also his first year on the school’s faculty. He’s seen the program grow and change in massive ways in the last 20 years, particularly — obviously — in delivery methods.
“All of online has completely changed since then,” Terry tells Poets&Quants with a laugh. “I think now there’s much more video/audio content in the online courses and obviously the technology changes have dramatically changed online delivery.”

GMAT GOES ‘BY THE WAYSIDE’
With more than 800 students, West Texas’ online MBA is one of the premier regional U.S. programs. Ranked 47th by U.S. News & World Report in 2017, it offers the choice of an exclusively remote or a combined distance/on-campus experience, and at a fraction of the cost of the major national programs: just under $18,000 for out-of-state students and about $15,000 for in-state. The online courses are the same that full-time MBA students take, but the online degree can be attained in as little as a year to 18 months. Moreover, it’s common for students to acquire a GMAT waiver — all they need is an undergraduate GPA above 3.0. That’s a huge selling point that can’t be underestimated.
“Essentially I think the GMAT for a lot of programs is going to the wayside,” Terry says. “When I first started, everyone had to take the GMAT, and then at some point in time we noticed that that wasn’t the case. I called AACSB and…

West Texas A&M is no stranger to the online delivery of business education. Classes have been offered online as far back as 1998, though back then, says Dr. Neil Terry, dean of the College of Business and professor of economics, the online MBA program was little more than a “glorified correspondence course.”

Terry has a unique perspective on West Texas’ online MBA: 1998 was also his first year on the school’s faculty. He’s seen the program grow and change in massive ways in the last 20 years, particularly — obviously — in delivery methods.
“All of online has completely changed since then,” Terry tells Poets&Quants with a laugh. “I think now there’s much more video/audio content in the online courses and obviously the technology changes have dramatically changed online delivery.”

GMAT GOES ‘BY THE WAYSIDE’
With more than 800 students, West Texas’ online MBA is one of the premier regional U.S. programs. Ranked 47th by U.S. News & World Report in 2017, it offers the choice of an exclusively remote or a combined distance/on-campus experience, and at a fraction of the cost of the major national programs: just under $18,000 for out-of-state students and about $15,000 for in-state. The online courses are the same that full-time MBA students take, but the online degree can be attained in as little as a year to 18 months. Moreover, it’s common for students to acquire a GMAT waiver — all they need is an undergraduate GPA above 3.0. That’s a huge selling point that can’t be underestimated.
“Essentially I think the GMAT for a lot of programs is going to the wayside,” Terry says. “When I first started, everyone had to take the GMAT, and then at some point in time we noticed that that wasn’t the case. I called AACSB and they said 80% of the programs have some kind of ‘out’ clause. What tends to happen with most students now — at least for most regional schools like ours — if you require the GMAT and they haven’t taken it, then they won’t end up going through the application process and joining you. And if they don’t meet your GMAT waiver requirements, then they go and try to find somewhere else that will take them.

“I try to tell them, scholarships and that kind of stuff is often tied to GMAT — but so many of our students, about 70%, have tuition reimbursement from employers. One of the reasons that we have relatively high enrollment is that we have AACSB accreditation and we’re ranked relatively high with things like U.S. News & World Report, but our price point is a lot cheaper. If you were an employer and you had $10,000 per year tuition reimbursement, then in a two-year period you could actually do our program and have it all paid for.”

A GREAT VARIETY OF COURSES, CORE AND ELECTIVE
Since West Texas has been in the online MBA game for so long, it knows how to play. The program has boasted its own dedicated studio and editing room for the last several years, and with such a large student population, the school is able to offer a wide variety of classes — not just electives but core classes, too.

“A lot of time people are doing programs where they take an accounting course and they can take one course — they gotta take a required managerial accounting course,” Terry says. “We have two or three options: You can do regular managerial accounting, but you can also do more of an application-based accounting, like healthcare accounting, and in economics you can do micro or macro, which is pretty common, but we also have other options. Most MBA programs you have to take a management, you have to take a marketing, accounting — but if you look at our curriculum, then you have three or four choices in most of those areas. It won’t just end up being a seminar in marketing — you could also do evolutionary marketing, you could also do a research methods marketing course.”

That kind of variety is West Texas’ hallmark, Terry says. And there’s a reason for it all. “MBA students are really pretty varied at this point in time,” Terry says. “Originally MBAs were set up many years ago for engineering students to go through and get a business background, and that’s not the nature of what MBA programs are now — now we have a lot of students who come from a business background, and so the old curriculum that was really set for engineers was really not that enriching for people who already have a business degree. At the same time, you need to offer the old classes because if someone doesn’t have a business background they need to take more of the traditional managerial accounting, more of the traditional corporate finance, seminar in marketing, those types of courses.

“All of that is only really possible because we have reached the point where we scale. The typical MBA program with 100 students can’t offer the diversity of classes we offer. Once we scaled, that gave us the ability to offer a pretty big diversity of classes.”

‘YOU’RE NOT TREATED JUST LIKE A NUMBER’
As an undergraduate and graduate student, Lisa Mitchell worked in the West Texas president’s office; right after she graduated with her MBA she got a job within the College of Business, where she works now. As coordinator of graduate business programs, Mitchell talks every day with online students who offer feedback on what’s working for them and what’s presenting challenges.

“It is very challenging, to the point where you kind of question what you’re doing,” says the 2014 grad, harkening back to her own experience in the online program. “But challenges, as you know, help us learn. And that’s definitely how I had to look at it throughout the entire thing. There were also things within the MBA program, even as a College of Business graduate, that I was like, ‘Holy crap, I completely forgot all about this!’ And I had to even go back to some undergraduate stuff to look and give me a little more background to be able to really jump into that an d immerse myself in that subject. And I had graduated just the year before!”

Mitchell, a New Mexico native who lived and worked on campus while completing the program, took a “blended” approach, attending some classes and doing some work online. Either way, she says, she was never treated like a number — possibly the best reason to consider West Texas.
“I definitely loved the networking factor of it,” says Mitchell, 26. “I have met so many people throughout my graduate program that I still talk to, and they’re very successful and I can call them if it’s in their field and i can get advice and I can ask them — we kind of help each other out. That networking was probably one of the best things that I got from it, just from the simple fact that it’s very personal — you’re not treated just like a number, and that’s definitely nice in a grad program the size of ours.

“The really nice thing was, it meshed so well with working full-time and going to school full-time. It meshed perfectly. I could really manage my time very well with both things.”

BIG BOOST IN SALARIES POST-MBA
West Texas admits students three times in the year, during fall, spring, and summer. The April intake is biggest, says Neil Terry, but enrollment is relatively open “as long as there’s space.”

In its last full graduation in May 2017, 80% of online MBA students already had jobs, with an average salary just over $80,000. At intake those students were making around $54,000 — so that’s a boost of $26,000, a 33% jump, Terry points out.

What makes the West Texas A&M online MBA program unique? Video. With its own studio, the school merrily cranks out tons content. “We probably have as much if not more video content than any other program,” Neil Terry says, “and the variety of courses that you can go through as part of your core requirements — it’s pretty diverse. You have some choices. Usually you’ll have an adviser based on your background that will try to help you.”
And they don’t just have course videos. They have videos to get you prepared for the program, too. “Our thought process is that having the intro videos in online classes allows a student to not only look at a syllabus before they take a class, it gives them a feel for the course in kind of a richer format,” Terry says.