Questrom’s Online MBA serves people who don’t have two years to spare for a residential MBA program or $100,000 to pay for it. Photo by Janice Checchio

Digital Learning

Questrom’s New Online MBA a Hit

Students commend price, flexibility, and a different learning model

Down in New Orleans, Jermaine Smith had a quandary. The veteran nonprofit executive wanted an MBA to pump up his skills and his earning potential. But with a family and a mortgage, he didn’t have two years to spare for a residential MBA program or the $100,000 to pay for it.

The answer was the new Questrom School of Business Online MBA, launched last fall. Smith could do the coursework online without disrupting his job or family life. And at $24,000, it cost only about a quarter of a residential degree.

“Now I’ve got an opportunity to go to a really great school, pay basically a bargain price for it, and I don’t have to stop earning money in the interim,” says Smith (Questrom’23), now the vice president of major gifts for Boston-based nonprofit City Year. “What’s great is that now that I’m in the program, all the things I expected of it turned out to be true.”

Conceived in 2019 and launched last fall in a marketing partnership with the global online education platform edX, Questrom’s Online MBA has been a success from the get-go. 

“This is the biggest experiment we have ever run,” says Susan Fournier, Questrom’s Allen Questrom Professor and Dean. “To go from zero to launch in nine months with an online MBA at scale, this is a lot. Success was dependent on all the pieces coming together for a program that deserves the credential of the MBA and deserves the brand of BU Questrom School of Business on it.”

Questrom increased the initial cohort from 200 to 400 students because of the demand from an experienced population of working professionals who understand the usefulness of online learning, and it enrolled the same number in the second cohort this past January. May 12 is the final application deadline for next fall, and the school is planning to enroll  500 students. Continued growth is in the works, says Monica Moore, assistant dean, online MBA.

“We jumped right into the deep end,” says Moore, who joined Questrom last summer, just days before the first students began the program on August 3.

The average Questrom Online MBA student is 37 years old, with a dozen years of work experience, compared to an average age of 28 and 6 years of work experience for residential MBA students. 

“Lowering the cost opens up the market in different ways,” says Paul Carlile, Questrom senior associate dean, online learning, and a professor of information systems. “It works for people who would have to leave a city or job they love to enter a traditional MBA program, and for people who found that much more expensive online products weren’t meeting their needs.”

In addition to serving an older, more experienced group of students, the Online MBA attracts a broad demographic of both international students and students from different income groups. A significant number are the first in their families to seek a graduate degree.

“Behind the numbers, there are a lot of adult learners in this country and around the world who have been underserved with a reasonably priced, higher-quality MBA,” Carlile says. “We care about this a lot. Equity in education is in the emotional DNA of what we do.”

Changing demand may have been the real reason for a long decline in traditional MBA enrollments, a trend that affected BU, he says, just like many of its peers. Demand has spiked back to its previous levels during the pandemic, as graduate education often sees an uptick during tough economic times. But the success of the Online MBA suggests that a large population of students needed something different, he says.

“These are adult learners in a way we haven’t had before,” Fournier says . “It’s a whole new audience, and a big one.”

But reaching that audience required learning how to do a program at scale—“no minor skill set,” she says—and to create a fully integrated curriculum from scratch: “Those are big successes.” It was also important to make the program fit comfortably within the school’s existing portfolio of MBAs, she says. 

Smith was working as a regional development executive with the Red Cross when he applied. Before he started the program, as part of the second student cohort in January, he landed the national-level job with City Year. “My first thought was, oh my god, I’m so glad I got into this program because I’m going to need to know things that I don’t know right now,” he says. “Every week lightbulbs are going on for me. I felt there were aspects of business that weren’t being applied at nonprofits that absolutely could be. I just needed to understand the concepts better to be able to connect the dots.” 

The Online MBA dispenses with typical siloed courses in favor of six interdisciplinary modules based on business problems. “For example, one module is called ‘How do you use data to manage performance?’” Carlile says. “Notice I didn’t use the words accounting or statistics or operations or finance, did I? But all those disciplines are in that module to address this business problem. Our modules are built that way.”

Smith was disappointed in other schools’ online MBA programs, which seemed to just move their brick-and-mortar pedagogy online, and he found the BU approach really exciting. “That’s how it works at your job, right? I never say, ‘OK, guys, today we’ve got an accounting problem and it doesn’t affect anything else!’ It’s always two or three different levers at one time. And they built it ground up, thinking about how they were going to integrate it.”

The new pedagogy wasn’t a deciding factor for veteran hospitality executive Leslie Lew (SHA’06, Questrom’23), also a member of the January cohort.

“BU is a brand I trust,” says Lew, a founding partner of the new This Assembly hotel firm and vice president of revenue and distribution for its hotel-management subsidiary. “My undergraduate degree from the School of Hospitality Administration catapulted me to be a senior executive in the hospitality industry, and because of that, there’s no better place for me going back for a graduate degree.”

Lew predicts that the online format is the wave of the future. “I really believe in online learning, and by being one of the first people to usher in this degree, I want to help remove any stigma from online graduate programs,” he says. “As a business owner, especially working in multiple time zones and locales, the flexibility is key.”

He also appreciates the real-time benefits of the Questrom program, which allows him to better communicate to investors and other large stakeholders about business methods that he’s using every day. “Now I can take these concepts and articulate to people why it works,” he says.

Both students say a key benefit of in the Online MBA program is the teamwork they are thrust into with other students, who may be equally accomplished but from different industries and from all over the world.

“There’s tons of things I’ve learned from my team already,” says Smith. “There’s an attorney who works for a children’s hospital and a guy who works in financial services, a person doing IT stuff, a person doing oil and gas, and I’m in nonprofits. We’re all over the place. I chat with them on a weekly basis and just learn.”

“This week I am talking with classmates from London and Sydney, people who represent global firms like Disney and Netflix,” Lew says. “There’s the old saying that part of the value of the MBA is the value of the network.” 

“We are dependent on these students to show up with their best selves and their experiences to share peer-to-peer,” Carlile says.”We need their good will, their intelligence, and their expertise on display.”

Students also want to use what they learn to benefit their world. “When they were asked what is their number-one motivation, ‘having an impact’ was extremely high compared to our peers,” says Moore. “Students are coming not just looking to earn a few more dollars now, but using the knowledge to have social impact.”

The program’s reputation is already growing. Moore notes that 49 percent of students in the first cohort and 39 percent in the second can get a portion of their tuition reimbursed by their employer, high for an online program.

Find more information or apply for the Questrom Online MBA here.