Covid Surge Threatens M.B.A. Programs' Already Limited Back-to-School Plans
2020-08-05 09:30:00.75 GMT
By Patrick Thomas
(Dow Jones) -- Business schools spent months scrambling to provide fall M.B.A.
classes with at least some of the on-campus experience that students say makes
the pricey degree worth it. Weeks before classes start, some of those plans
are already falling apart.
Last week, two of the country's highest-profile business schools -- the
University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Georgetown University's
McDonough School of Business -- joined the list of M.B.A. programs and
universities shelving plans for a hybrid of online and in-person classes and
shifting to a nearly all-virtual model, at least temporarily.
As coronavirus cases have surged nationwide over the summer, "it became clear
that what we could deliver would not be sustainable amid the shifting
situation," Howie Kaufold, the school's vice dean, wrote in a letter to
Wharton's M.B.A. students Friday. At Georgetown, business school officials
said classes would return to a hybrid format, as originally planned, when
health experts and local rules permitted.
At universities, M.B.A. programs have faced particular pressure to offer at
least some in-person learning. Many students and schools alike say much of the
value of the traditional, two-year degree -- which can cost more than $200,000
with living expenses at some programs -- comes from in-person activities, such
as networking with classmates, overseas trips and career fairs.
"A lot of the value of the program is not only the instruction but the network
you create, the relationships with the other people in the program, the
opportunities to engage with alumni and faculty," said Peter Johnson, an
assistant dean at the Haas School of Business at the University of California,
Berkeley. "It's not that you can't do those things remotely; it's just
different."
In a July survey of 130 business schools by the Association to Advance
Collegiate Schools of Business, 87% said they planned to adopt a mix of
on-campus and remote teaching, either by staggering the number of students in
a classroom at any one time or holding courses with a small number of
enrollees in-person.
Some graduate-level business schools have the advantage of being isolated from
the rest of the campus, which they say lets them manage a smaller group of
students in ways that other schools can't. At Berkeley, where the Haas School
has its own cluster of buildings, much of the university's roughly 40,000
general student population will take classes online this fall, but its
approximately 600 M.B.A. students can split into small groups and stay
socially distanced, Mr. Johnson said.
Harvard Business School, which sits in Boston across the Charles River from
Harvard's main campus and has single-bedroom dormitories for many M.B.A.
students who live on campus, is also planning a blended approach. Students,
faculty and staff who come to campus and frequently interact with others will
be tested every three days for Covid-19. Students will be able to do small
group work, and some classes will have in-person elements, though the school
hasn't determined how many will, said Jan Rivkin, a senior associate dean and
head of the school's M.B.A. program.
"It's a massive benefit," he said of the business school's more removed
location and housing. "There is no way we could hold up the hope of being
hybrid in part of our classes if we didn't have that," Mr. Rivkin said.
Still, some students are questioning whether even a partially online degree is
worth it. Harvard said this summer that its incoming fall M.B.A. class would
be about 20% smaller than normal after many students took up its offer to let
them defer their studies. At Wharton, a group of M.B.A. students petitioned
the school for a tuition discount even before it decided to shift to chiefly
online studies. The school has said it won't adjust tuition this year.
About 270 M.B.A students at New York University's Stern School of Business
signed a similar letter to school administrators, asking that the school not
follow through on its planned 3.5% tuition increase and instead discount its
tuition.
A spokeswoman for the Stern school said the university sets tuition for all of
its programs annually but that it has increased full-time M.B.A. scholarships
in 2020 and taken a variety of other steps to maximize its student experience
this year. The school, which is planning a hybrid teaching model for the fall,
said it expects roughly one-third of classes to be in-person or have
significant in-person components, and it added more sections to some courses
to shrink class sizes. The rest will be online, a school spokeswoman said.
"Business school itself is an immersive experience. When you sign up for
business school, you're paying a high price tag for all the events that come
with it," said Matthew Korinek, a member of Stern's 2021 M.B.A. class who
wrote the letter. "When you're stuck at home you're not getting a lot of
that."
