Everything You Need To Know About the Changes to Our MBA
Midland University launched its MBA program in Omaha in 2013. To stay competitive in the market, we’ve made improvements that will allow us to stay “relentlessly relevant.”
Five Ways We’ve Improved Our MBA
1. Lower Credit Hours
After completing a market analysis, we realized we were really heavy on credit requirements, which obviously adds to the length of the program and to the cost of tuition. The first thing we decided to do was to change our required credits from 42 to 36 to align our credit requirements and our tuition with our competition.
2. Customized Learning
To provide students with enhanced flexibility, we broke our curriculum into two categories, analytical and strategic courses. The analytical courses will be focused on data and the strategic courses will relate to our marketing, leadership, and communications courses.
This change will allow our students the freedom to choose five courses that fulfill their requirements and that allows our students the ability to customize their MBA, which is really a huge differentiator for our MBA program.
3. Capstone Experience
Our Business Consulting Capstone is the course that everybody’s intimidated by before they take it. But, in reality, a lot of our students come away from the experience saying, “that was the best experience I’ve had.”
To emphasize the value of our capstone experience, we’ve changed the course from three credits to six credits. The reason for the additional credits is to accommodate the time needed in class to assist our students with the things they need prior to meeting with their organizations. This allows our instructor additional class time to focus on teaching the concepts prior to the first meeting with the organization’s point of contact. This will allow students to complete it within one term and take the capstone experience by itself. With the change in the structure of our courses, we are now able to offer the Business Consulting Capstone experience twice per year, in the late spring and early fall terms.
4. Program Scholarships
By lowering our cost of tuition, we’ve been able to lower the amount of out-of-pocket expenses for our students. On top of the lowered tuition, thanks to donor-sponsored scholarships, Midland MBA is proud to be able to award scholarships to 100% of accepted students. Whether you’re paying 100 percent for your MBA, or getting employer tuition remission, the students will benefit from a lower cost of tuition.
5. In-Person Weekend Days
Originally, our program held in-person weekend courses on a Friday and Saturday about every third week. Now, our terms are changing from a nine-week term to an eight-week term at an institutional level. This change provided us with a challenge to adjust how we schedule in-person weekend courses so we could maintain 12 hours of face-to-face time.
The new schedule for our MBA students is in-person weekend days will be moving to every other week, which will allow students to take a Friday class, or a Saturday class. With this new enhanced flexibility, we’ll be offering a larger variety of classes for students to choose from each term. Students will be able to tailor their courses to fit their busy schedules, choosing to take courses on a Friday or a Saturday. This is a significant change that will be able to benefit our busy professionals, who will be able to better balance their personal lives with their work and school schedules.
*MBA changes will go into effect in August of 2021.
Our MBA Implementation of the Plan
For the current students who are in the midst of completing their MBA, they will have a choice to stay on their current path or switch to the new format once the changes come into effect in early fall 2021. Our advisors have been working hard to provide each current student with an individualized plan of study based on their individual situation.
Each student will set up a meeting with their advisor, where they will go over the impact to that student and answer any questions they may have.
A Message From the Dean
The main thing I want our students to know is we’ve taken the time to make sure that we can hand you information specific to your situation. Our goal is by doing this ahead of time, that we will be able to help you digest the changes to the MBA structure.
Overall, I hope all of our students come away from this feeling supported, listened to, and encouraged that these changes are going to make us a more solid program.
