It used to be that if you were a professional looking to pivot to a new role or industry, you’d consider a full-time, residential MBA program. The career services and internship pipelines laid out well-worn paths to new career opportunities.
The online MBA, on the other hand, was more often viewed as an investment by employers in current employees and a way for individuals to move up within their current company or, at least, career path.
Those days are increasingly on the way out.
For the past four years, we’ve asked recent online MBA graduates from top programs if they changed employers as a result of the degree as part of our annual ranking of online MBA programs. The percentage of graduates answering in the affirmative has grown from 22.48% three years ago to 33% this year. Another 20% reported changing industries, and 47% reported changing job functions.
In this story, we take a deeper look at job mobility of potential pivoters in online MBA programs. For our 2024 ranking, we sent a survey to 9,080 Class of 2023 alumni at 51 ranked programs. We received 1,512 responses. (See 2024’s ranking of the best online MBA programs here.)
Scroll down or click through the following pages to see how many alumni at each school were able to make changes in:
EMPLOYERS
INDUSTRIES
JOB FUNCTIONS
CAREERS
You can also see how 2023 alumni rated their overall programs in this story, and how they rated the degree’s career impact here.
ALUMNI CHANGING EMPLOYERS
This year, three schools had 60% of alumni report that they changed employers either during or shortly after graduation: American University’s Kogod Business School, Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business, and SUNY Oswego School of Business.
In all, half or more of alumni at seven schools switched employers because of their degree.
Did you change employers as a result of the program? |
|
School | Percent ‘Yes’ |
American University (Kogod) | 60% |
Rice University (Jones) | 60% |
SUNY Oswego | 60% |
Bryant University | 50% |
Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) | 50% |
University of Southern California (Marshall) | 50% |
University of Texas at Dallas | 50% |
University of Michigan (Ross) | 48.57% |
Southern Methodist University (Cox) | 48.15% |
University of North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler) | 43.94% |
Rogers State University | 42.86% |
University of Utah (Eccles) | 42.86% |
University of California, Davis | 41.67% |
University of South Florida (Muma) | 41.67% |
Pepperdine University (Graziadio) | 41.38% |
University of Washington (Foster) | 41.18% |
Florida International University | 37.78% |
University of Delaware (Lerner) | 37.50% |
Bowling Green | 36.11% |
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga | 35.71% |
University of Maryland (Smith) | 35.45% |
Indiana University (Kelley) | 35.43% |
Baylor University (Hankamer) | 33.33% |
Clemson University | 33.33% |
Worcester Polytechnic Institute | 33.33% |
Ohio University | 31.43% |
San Jose State University (Lucas) | 31.25% |
University of Wisconsin MBA Consortium | 31.25% |
Louisiana State University (Ourso) | 30.95% |
William & Mary (Mason) | 30% |
University of Cincinnati (Lindner) | 29.41% |
Creighton University (Heider) | 27.78% |
University of Florida (Warrington) | 27.59% |
University of Massachusetts-Lowell | 25.86% |
North Carolina State University (Jenkins) | 25% |
Santa Clara University (Leavey) | 25% |
University of North Texas | 25% |
Washington State University | 24.05% |
University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Isenberg) | 23.91% |
Auburn University (Harbert) | 23.81% |
Jack Welch Management Institute | 22.99% |
Syracuse University (Whitman) | 22.22% |
University of Iowa (Tippie) | 22.08% |
University of Nebraska | 21.43% |
University of Michigan-Dearborn | 20% |
Kennesaw State University | 16.67% |
University of Denver (Daniels) | 15.38% |
Drexel University (LeBow) | 11.76% |
Villanova University | 11.76% |
Hofstra University (Zarb) | 11.11% |
Lehigh University | 9.09% |
Click through the following pages for data on how alumni changed industries, job functions, and careers.
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