Virtual Advantage

Online programs allow busy executives to get an MBA without going MIA, but how do they compare with the classroom experience?

Feb 1, 2010  

by Caitlin Crawshaw

To avoid this, Royal Roads University uses a blended model for its MBA, as it does for many of its programs. Students must complete two residencies at the university’s headquarters in Victoria, B.C., in addition to electronic coursework.

When Lorelei Higgins started the MBA program last spring, she initially found it awkward to communicate with her peers. “It’s kind of like MySpace: you can read about them, but you don’t know them.” After meeting everyone during the three-week residency in July, things changed. There was a sense of community. “It’s funny. After three weeks of living together in residency, you can’t hide yourself anymore,” she says. Even CEOs and top-level managers can no longer “hide behind their titles.” But knowing people well – and having done the Myers-Briggs personality assessment as a group at the start of the program – isn’t just about warm fuzzies. It helps students constructively resolve conflicts in the virtual environment, she points out.

At 28, Higgins isn’t the typical student in the program. The average age of an MBA student at Royal Roads University is 39 and most are male (55%), which is similar to AU’s MBA student base. Though younger than her classmates, Higgins says she’d actually postponed going back to school because of finances. “Once you start making a wage and don’t live like a student, it’s hard to consider doing it full time,” she says. Higgins applied for scholarships at some class-based programs but when she didn’t receive them, she decided to consider online learning. Her former and current bosses had nothing but good things to say about Royal Roads, and when she discovered the university had a leadership stream, she was sold.

For a middle manager in strategic services at the City of Calgary, her MBA sounds like a career booster, but Higgins says her decision to invest in the program (which will cost about $36,000) is about learning, not letters. This might be a good thing. There seems to be little evidence that an online MBA will catapult you to fame and fortune.

While employers probably don’t value an in-class program more than an online version, they’re also not all that persuaded by fancy education, says Sheila Musgrove of Tag Recruitment Group. “What we’re seeing in the market is more that employers are looking for specific industry experience. The experience at this point is outweighing postgraduate education,” she says. Of course, if you and another candidate have equal experience and interviewed just as well, your online MBA “might very well be a differentiator.”

Mike Houston, a senior consultant in sales and marketing at David Aplin Recruiting, agrees that MBAs aren’t golden tickets in this economy. He’s actually known candidates who had more success finding a job after they took the MBA off of their resumé. In one case, “[The candidate] was at a certain level of salary compensation where employers were not looking at him because they thought he was overqualified.”

Houston disagrees that in-class and online programs are perceived equally. In his experience, “Clients and corporations give the in-class scenario considerably more credibility since it requires that much more commitment and continuance of thought and energy.”

Hurst’s philosophy is that there’s a synthesis that happens between the two realms when students are able to immediately apply what they learn in the work environment.

McInnis agrees. “Just the way I learn, I found it a lot better to take those academic concepts and apply them to the real world, to what I was doing at the time.” Even before graduating, he was promoted to a higher level of management at a financial services company – something he attributes to the program. However, he believes the more abstract benefits are also valuable. “The experience I’ve had in my career gives me a certain amount of confidence, but adding the academic theory and tying that into what I think I know gives me more confidence to act in my current role.”

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