Online MBA Forum

You can expect to exceed the normal wages growth by a lot more than most workers if you have an MBA. The Statistical Abstracts of the US government prove that since 1993 there has been a consistent wages growth of more than 2% over inflation for holders of professional degrees such as an online MBA, whereas people with undergraduate degrees can only expect wages growth of 1% over inflation.

The net effect of this over your whole career is that you will have double the average annual wages growth with an online MBA than your wages growth if you simply had an undergraduate degree. Although gaining your online MBA means that you have to forfeit time and money in the form of fees, the payback on this investment over your career is demonstrably worth while.

Holding a professional degree such as an MBA helps you stay in work. According to the statistical abstracts of the US government, the unemployment rate for people with MBAs and similar degrees is 25% less than for people who have an undergraduate degree. Since 1970 the unemployment rates have been 1.9% and 2.4% respectively.

This gives you a spectacularly stable work ability - one of the primary ways of making sure that you maximize your salary over your working life. It also means that you are much less likely to be stressed by the problems surrounding your work environment, making your life more pleasant, and giving you the ability to plan for the long term.

Studying for an online MBA really does make a major difference to your life

There are many arguments as to whether the MBA has outlived its usefulness, and whether there is a beneficial effect for MBA graduates. Davies and Cline did an analysis of the performance of "plain vanilla" MBA graduate performance in comparison with average college graduates over the whole course of their careers.

The first and most important finding they made was that in 2002, participants of MBA programs (usually college graduates) earned a median salary of $50,000. Immediately they had finished their programs in 2003, the median starting salary was $75,000, excluding any signing bonus.

I've been talking about how useful MBA program alumni can be, but in fact one of the most useful aspects of having studied an MBA is the continued contact that you will have with the institution that offered you your online MBA program. Most institutions make great efforts to keep in touch with their past students, organizing events and conferences that will be of interest to them and making sure that they are a part of the network of contacts that organizations as well as individuals need.

This can have great value, as you get to know past and future students as well as those of your year. You are alos kept in touch with the latest management thinking, giving you a chance to create a really good continuous education program for yourself based on your MBA.

An ex-student of mine who is applying for an online MBA asked me what the academic level of an MBA is. His comment was that when he looked at the outline of each of the individual subject courses, they appeared to be not much higher than a bachelor degree level, but the Masters part didn't seem to fit.

Of course, in a way he was right. One of the reasons that the MBA is set apart from other graduate degrees is that it is graduate level, but in a different way from other programs. The subject courses are informational, but the graduate elements of an MBA program are in the project work. This has to be completed in a much more integrated fashion than normal in education, with unique solutions, integrating actions across functional disciplines, and creating new strategies and the tactics to enable the strategies to work.

Make no mistake, studying on an online MBA is a tough intellectual exercise - but a great preparation for a senior management career.