The Top One-Year MBA Programs In The U.S.

Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business offers one of just a handful of one-year MBA programs at major business schools in the U.S. The Mendoza one-year MBA starts in June and has an average of 33 students each year. Notre Dame photo

A graduate degree was not something Samantha Wargolet had given a lot of thought to pursuing. Born and raised in Minnesota, she got her undergraduate degree in Ohio before returning home to work for consulting giant Deloitte in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Wargolet’s career was humming along nicely, but soon higher education began to beckon. Deloitte is one of the world’s foremost employers of MBAs, and Wargolet worked every day with colleagues who had — or who planned to get — the degree. But there was a major sticking point: the idea of putting her career on hold for two years. That was a strange concept.

“No one in my family had ever done anything like that,” she says.

The solution: a one-year MBA. And for a bonus, the one-year program that many consider the best in the world just happened to be in that same region where she had spent most of her life.

BIG CONCERNS ABOUT TAKING 2 YEARS OFF

Samantha Wargolet

“I always intended to graduate, get a career I enjoyed, and just stick with that,” Wargolet tells Poets&Quants. “For me, it was really after starting my job at Deloitte that I began to meet a lot of colleagues who spoke really highly of their MBA experiences and the impact it had on their careers.”

She was convinced that she needed an MBA to further her career. But two years away from everything she had worked hard to build was a non-starter.

“Personally, I’ve always valued education, I’ve always enjoyed academics. So I was excited about the idea of maybe continuing that — but that was certainly not in the plan,” she says. “I think the biggest thing for me was that I still had a lot of concerns about taking two full years out of the workforce.”

Her plans began to change when she learned about the one-year MBA program at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois, which many consider the premier accelerated MBA program in the U.S.

“It seemed like a really good fit to get what I wanted out of an MBA, but not take that full two years out,” says Wargolet, who was admitted to the Kellogg 1Y MBA program last spring and will graduate this May. “And I had a lot of close colleagues who just happened to attend the 1Y Kellogg program and they all spoke so highly of the experience and the great value of a one-year program. And finally, after I visited, it was clear that Kellogg would also be a really good cultural fit.

“It was definitely my top choice, when I was applying to different schools.”

LITTLE CHANGE IN NUMBER OF APPLICANTS CONSIDERING A 1-YEAR MBA

Are one-year MBA programs still “having a moment”? Poets&Quants suggested they might be when we last visited the subject in 2019. (We previously examined the advantages and drawbacks of one-year MBAs here and here.) The answer is: possibly, but the data — all but meaningless after a year complicated by coronavirus — won’t make the case.

One-year MBAs offer a chance for professionals to “Get in. Get out. Get back to work” as one well-known school puts it on their program website. They are the U.S. graduate management ecosystem’s answer to Europe’s popular one-year master in management programs. But they haven’t caught on in the way specialty master’s programs, particularly in finance and business analytics, have in the last five years; and they look to be losing a step to online MBA programs as well, the latter a contest that has certainly intensified in the last year. Further, one-year MBAs have at least partly been caught in the headwinds that had stymied the growth of two-year programs before relaxed testing requirements and extended admissions deadlines last year reversed years of declines.

There’s no shortage of reasons to believe that coronavirus has not been kind to the accelerated MBA. One top school delayed the start of a pair of one-year programs last year, and enrollment is declining at others. Havoc in admissions continues in the form of continued deadline extensions and loosened testing requirements.

Rahul Choudaha, director of industry insights and research communications for the Graduate Management Admission Council, says data about one-year MBAs from GMAC’s major 2019 survey of prospective students is not directly comparable with new, as-yet-unreleased 2020 data — and Covid-19 is at least indirectly to blame. Choudaha tells P&Q that in an effort to “provide better predictive insights” in reporting data from July to December 2020 for those planning to pursue graduate management education in 2021, GMAC used data on “program preferences” as compared to “program considerations” — and therefore “the questions are different and not comparable.” However, he was able to find one apples-to-apples data point: program consideration for one-year MBA for July to December 2019 versus July to December 2020, which shows that “the numbers are flat at 46%.”

But there is a bright side. Choudaha says as part of nearly 70% of programs participating in GMAC’s 2020 Application Trends Survey reporting growth in applications amid the pandemic — up from just 30% of programs in 2019 — one-year program demand also has enjoyed a reversal in fortunes.

“Given that candidates of one-year MBAs are likely to have more work experience than the two-year MBA program candidates, they are motivated to seek leadership roles,” Choudaha says, adding that in the forthcoming Prospective Students Survey, due out this month, “candidates preferring a one-year MBA noted that obtaining a senior-level position is their top career goal compared to getting a salary increase for two-year MBA candidates. One-year MBA programs continue to offer value to mid-career professionals who plan to ride out this economic downturn with stronger skillsets and deeper networks needed to take senior roles.”

‘VERY, VERY STRONG’ ADMISSIONS SEASON FOR 2 CORNELL PROGRAMS

Among the top 23 one-year MBAs in the U.S., eight are at elite schools whose two-year programs are ranked in the top 25. Two of those schools have two one-year MBA programs each; and if the deans at one of those two schools, Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management, have serious concerns about the long-term viability of their one-year MBA programs, they aren’t letting on.

Cornell Johnson Dean Mark Nelson

Enrollment may be down at both the one-year MBA based in Ithaca, New York, and the Cornell Tech MBA on Roosevelt Island in New York City, but Dean Mark Nelson doesn’t hesitate in waving that away as a Covid “blip” — and as evidence, he points to as-yet-unpublished application numbers for the incoming Class of 2022 that starts in May.

“We are looking at an admission season that is very, very strong, and that I think is capturing the fact that students are seeing the value of the degree, both our one-year MBA here at Ithaca and also the Johnson Cornell Tech degree,” Nelson tells P&Q. “I feel like our students have been doing well with our virtual teaching environment. It’s obviously something that everyone’s looking forward to moving on to face-to-face instruction from. But on the other hand, frankly, the school was really well-positioned to be able to offer virtual teaching, given that we have some synchronous distance teaching that we do with our Americas MBA program on an ongoing basis. So that was tremendously helpful.

“We’re having good placement success for the students in the program. So in general, I think we’re quite pleased. The enrollment drop is a one-year blip.

“With a program that starts in May, and you’re closing the class over the course of winter/spring, so you’ve got people in this tremendous moment of uncertainty. And so what we said to them is, ‘You do what’s right for you, and we want you here if you want to be here, but it’s a natural time of disruption and we get it.’ There wasn’t people saying ‘We reject the one-year format.’ It was people saying ‘We really do not know what’s going on with the world.'”

Drew Pascarella, Cornell Johnson’s associate dean for MBA programs, adds that Cornell’s pair of one-year MBA programs proved the strength of the format when Covid hit in March 2020.

“Two months after Covid, we were launching the first two MBA programs in the country,” he says. “Normally we wouldn’t really talk about execution because it’s the cost of doing business, but I think it was a differentiator for us this year.

“We were curious to see how the students would respond and they started — and we did not come up with this, they did — they call themselves pioneers. They said, ‘We’re the ones that are going to go we’ll help figure this out.’ And I think that spirit was heartwarming to see in the moment and led to a much better result, because they really felt like they were part of the team.”

Happier times: The Sloan Fellows program has been conducted largely remotely this year amid the coronavirus pandemic.

What does Cornell’s leadership think about the long-term market value of the one-year MBA degree? It helps to be in a strong position like Cornell, an Ivy League school with a deep well of institutional knowledge — and few other schools can match that strong starting position, Drew Pascarella says.

“This is not a two-year MBA, and the advanced MBA student is a very unique student from the perspective of what they need, of how we should approach them, of how we should position them to the market,” he says. “So it’s hard to do this as a startup without that institutional knowledge, and we have 25 years of institutional knowledge about driving success in a 12-month format. So I think if you’re looking at a relatively constrained market and you’re looking at somebody like Cornell as a clear leader with all this domain knowledge, if you’re a leader of a school, I’m not exactly sure the right path forward is to enter and make that market more crowded. So I think it’s a market that we’ll continue to play very well in for years and likely won’t see additional competition. That’s one side.

“The second side is, when you think about where the market is going in the next three to five years, because it is a more constrained market, you have to think about the specific use cases for this degree. As Dean Nelson said, Tech has really kind of taken over in terms of placement — so if you have a technical student with technical work experience and maybe a technical master’s looking to go into tech product management, that is an awesome use case. That crew is growing, so the number of people that are coming to see us with that profile is increasing year over year. We can do a lot with them.”

Dean Nelson, a former accounting professor, adds another example: “You’ll have somebody that comes in and maybe they have a Ph.D. in molecular biology, and they come in and they do a one-year MBA and they end up being a CFO of a biotech firm. They have built this complementary set of skills that still lets them leverage their background. And we see that time and again. So it’s a really great platform for people to leverage that background — a focused market, but a strong one.”

FOREMOST EXECUTIVE PROGRAM CARRIES ON

Joanna DiFabio

MIT Sloan School of Management is another school with a deep — perhaps the deepest — well of institutional knowledge, and it has a one-year MBA program that merits a mention here. It is technically an executive program, with students — generally about 100 in each cohort — boasting 10 years’ experience or more on average. The Sloan Fellows program has been around for more than nine decades, making it perhaps the best known 12-month MBA program in the U.S., and warranting inclusion on any list of top U.S. one-year MBAs even if comparisons with the programs at Northwestern Kellogg, Cornell Johnson, NYU Stern, and elsewhere are inappropriate.

In one way at least last year, Sloan Fellows and MBA students at other one-year programs had one thing in common: coronavirus, and the experience of learning while locked down. But even after a wild and disruptive spring, the Sloan Fellows program enrolled its usual size class from the usual number of countries: 40.

“It was a scramble for sure,” Joanna DiFabio, assistant dean of the Sloan Fellows MBA and executive MBA at MIT, said of last year’s lockdown, which occurred at a particularly inconvenient time. “We were days away from going to D.C. for our module trips down there, and maybe it was eight days before we ended up going, that we decided not to go.”

After canceling its White House visit, Sloan Fellows had to cancel its other in-person components in short order — including its graduation in the spring, and subsequent summer classes for the incoming cohort.

“The community is so important still in the Sloan Fellows, I think it’s such a foundational block of who we are,” DiFabio said. “And that includes families, so we had a community send-off and we had a virtual graduation ceremony. For the summer term we decided to be completely online — running the same courses, but online, and creating community around that.”

Tom Harari, an entrepreneur who will graduate as a Sloan Fellow in 2021, said last year that the virtual classes weren’t ideal. But he quickly added that he wasn’t disappointed. The Sloan Fellows network is too important, he said, too influential, and too useful as he looks ahead in his career.

“For me, the network of the MIT Sloan community is number one,” Harari told P&Q. “Having a chance to take a step back from being in an operator role and building a company for a year, just kind of get my bearings and figure out what is the next company that I’m going to build. The on-campus would be great, but I understand the current situation and it’s certainly not disappointing for me.”

2-YEAR MBA REMAINS LESS RISKY OVERALL

Author and MBA admissions consultant Paul Bodine

With the virus still raging and so much in question at business schools around the world, the future of the one-year MBA is on many minds. Much, of course, will depend on large forces, economic, cultural, and otherwise.

Paul Bodine, founder and CEO of Admitify, an MBA admissions consultancy based in San Diego, says that as long as two-year MBA programs remain expensive, raising tuition at about the inflation rate year after year, “secular demand for alternatives” will continue. But he hastens to add that he doesn’t expect one-year MBAs to be the most popular alternatives — and the main problem is a structural one: a lack of internship.

“I was looking at the GMAC Application Trend Survey, and it was looking like the online MBA and part-time MBA are actually seeing greater application growth,” Bodine tells P&Q. “So I don’t know that applicants see the one-year as some kind of magic solution or something like that. I think they’re looking for any solution that’s going to give them a good education. I think the problem with the one-year is the lack of the internship. And that’s always going to be an issue.

“So I was thinking of it in terms of the cost risk, and the risk of a non-two-year MBA is lower — in that sense, the applicant is assuming less risk. But the two-year remains less risky, especially if you are a career changer. I feel like people looking at two-year MBA programs have a greater sense of what this will turn into in terms of career and income impact after the degree.

“So applicants have to make that tradeoff: ’Can I afford this more expensive two-year option, which is going to give me more certainty in terms of my outcomes, versus the one-year, which is definitely going to save the money, but maybe then I can’t make the career change.’”

‘WE WERE ALL GOING TO BE LIVING THROUGH A GLOBAL PANDEMIC’

By the time B-schools everywhere began going into lockdown in March 2020, Samantha Wargolet had already been accepted to Kellogg’s 1Y MBA and begun preparations to attend.

“I was excited about going, but I definitely was concerned,” she says. “I think everybody was concerned, no matter where they were in their life journey.”

Now nearing her May graduation, Wargolet reflects on the fact that all of her MBA experience has been virtual. But over the course of the last year, she has made peace with the virtual nature of the instruction and the difficulty in networking and working with classmates.

“For me, at the end of the day, this was the right time to get an MBA,” she says. “We all were going to be living through a global pandemic, no matter what. So I ultimately decided that now was still the best time. And honestly, this was maybe even better than it could have been in other years, because I think another year in the workforce would have been a lot less valuable than this year, pursuing additional education.

“It’s been really, really great. Obviously, everybody’s living through a global pandemic, so there have been elements that have been disappointing for anybody, just given that we have to work within the constraints of all of the state and local guidelines. But I do think that Kellogg has done a really great job of offering us everything that they possibly can during this time. And I also think that my 1Y class has really made the best of it. We’ve all come together to decide that we’re going to make this year the best experience we can for each other, and that’s definitely been a big highlight.

“The cultural fit at Kellogg was certainly right and I’m really happy that I’m here.”

See the next page for a list of all the major one-year MBA programs in the U.S., including links to schools’ one-year MBA web pages.

Duke Fuqua announced the launch of a one-year MBA for graduates of master’s in management programs in 2019, an effort to appeal to European applicants. The program’s inaugural cohort has spent its entire time in a virtual learning environment. File photo

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