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A blend of rigor and relevance.
Simply put, that is the recipe that graduate business schools in Utah -- and elsewhere in the United States -- have followed to produce Master of Business Administration degree-holders who are being actively courted by employers who recognize their value. With a capital V.
Consider: Those departing Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management with an MBA sheepskin under their arms are pulling down a mean salary of $5,458. Their counterparts at the University of Utah Eccles School of Business are exiting academia and entering the office with an average annual salary in the mid-$40s.
What a change from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a wave of corporate downsizing, coupled with a jerky economy, prompted employers to ponder whether the premium salaries they were paying MBA graduates truly resulted in value being added to their organizations.
"What exacerbated this, of course, was the fact that Wall Street in the '80s had acclerated the salary scale to the point that starting MBA grads were making more money than their professors," says John Seybolt, dean of the U's Eccles School of Business. "That just spiraled costs out of control. In the late '80s there was a pause, and practically every MBA program in the country went flat, at best, in terms of applicants and in terms of where the students would be going. That was a real jolt."
In response, "business schools read the tea leaves and changed. When I took over here in 1987 we went through a massive, three-year change in our cirriculum to try to address the issue of how to be rigorous, analytical and relevant We asked ourselves how we could give our students applied experience so that when they got in to a position they were indeed worth the extra commitment and amount of money."
The radically retooled curricula, hand-in-hand with an improved economy, brought a new dawn to the MBA beginning early this decade.
"Even in '93, there was a resurgance in the interest in the MBA," Seybolt says. "Of course, the economy was getting stronger, but people coming out with MBAs were seen as more applied...