What Is an MBA?

How Long Does an MBA Take to Complete?

A traditional, full-time MBA program typically takes two years to complete. However, many schools also offer accelerated, full-time MBA programs that enrollees can complete in one year.

Part-time MBA programs can sometimes take up to five years to complete, while executive MBA programs typically allow students who work full time to earn MBAs in two years while taking courses on a part-time basis.

Paying For an MBA Program

The average two-year MBA program costs $50,000-$100,000, depending on the school or course delivery format. However, there areaffordable MBA options out there, such as online programs, that usually cost less. Students can handle the cost of an MBA more easily by leveraging MBA scholarships, student loans, and federal work-study programs.

Employers sometimes subsidize MBA costs for their employees. From their perspective, more educated employees can better perform their job responsibilities and lead other employees.

What to Expect in an MBA Program

Most MBA programs hit on a few common touchstones, including organizational behavior, economics, and finance. Most MBA programs allow learners to choose electives related to their concentrations.

Traditional and accelerated MBA programs typically have rigorous course loads. However, programs intended for part-time students who work full time usually emphasize less take-home work.

MBA course structure places less emphasis on individual work and focuses more on group projects and presentations. Learners need to demonstrate their ability to work effectively with others to mirror healthy, functioning organizations.

Enrollees also cultivate strong leadership and self-advocacy skills. For example, many programs admit students of less academic ability based on resumes indicating their professional ambitions.

The following information presents a few of the essential skills taught in MBA programs.

Accreditation for MBA Programs

When shopping for an MBA program, take regional accreditation into account — a marker of quality assurance that can strongly influence your learning experience and professional opportunities.

In addition to regional accreditation, check if prospective programs hold programmatic accreditation from the following accrediting bodies for MBA programs: the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the International Accreditation Council for Business Education, and the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs.

Interview with an Expert

Dr. Noam Wasserman

Dr. Noam Wasserman is dean of the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University in New York City. He was a professor of entrepreneurship for 13 years at Harvard Business School and the founder of an entrepreneurship center at the University of Southern California. He won the top teaching awards at each school. Wasserman is also the author of two bestselling books: The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Life Is a Startup: What Founders Can Teach Us about Making Choices and Managing Change (Stanford University Press, 2018).

Where did you get your MBA?

Harvard Business School.

What do you do for your career now?

In 2019 I became the dean of the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University. In this role, I get to exercise all of the muscles I built both outside academia and inside it: crafting strategy for the business school, developing curricula, mentoring new faculty, inspiring high-impact research, collaborating with the president and other deans on joint efforts to strengthen the university, working with donors to power new initiatives, tapping student leaders to help us further strengthen the school, and lots of other fun activities.

This fall, we will debut a completely new MBA program, designed for the post-COVID era and focused on developing high-demand marketplace skills, like business analytics and entrepreneurship/innovation. We are also introducing highly sophisticated online MS programs in real estate and accounting to complement our longtime in-person MS in taxation program.

What advice do you have for someone considering pursuing an MBA?

Start with a sense of your direction, but be open to discovering the unexpected. I entered Harvard planning five potential pursuits once I earned my MBA. The first semester knocked two off the list and added one that I'd never heard of before: venture capital. The next semester added yet another that I'd never thought about doing before: academia.

Lo and behold, the two fields added to my list — venture capital and academia — turned into my pursuits for the last two decades.

What was the hardest part of getting your MBA?

FOMO [fear of missing out]. There are so many things going on on campus that you could spend all day listening to CEO talks, attending club events, and doing myriad other activities.

My fourth child was born just before my leadership final, and I always want to make sure I have enough time for my family. So I had to learn how to draw clear boundaries between career and family, enabling me to make the most of my time while I'm on campus but also make sure to leave to get home for dinner.

What was the best part of getting your MBA?

Besides discovering great new unexpected career opportunities, the best part was getting out of my comfort zone.

By nature, I am a reactive learner, listening to the professor and questions from other students in order to absorb new information. One of the reasons I chose Harvard Business School was that it would force me to adopt a different style. Every course required you to throw yourself into discussions and hear 80 sharp minds pick apart the holes in your argument (on top of any pushback from the professor). After all, half of every course grade is class participation.

Doing so helped me find a happier medium between my natural mode and the much more active participation required by the program.

What do you think has been the biggest advantage to your career after completing your MBA?

In my academic career, I draw on both real-world knowledge and the ability to tap multiple disciplines. Both of those attributes came from my real-world, pre-MBA work experience and the MBA classroom, in contrast to the more narrow lens that's developed in the PhD programs from which academics typically come. Even when I was doing my PhD at Harvard, I made sure to delve into three different disciplines instead of the typical single-discipline doctoral training.

Now I'm drawing on the leadership and entrepreneurial skills I developed pre-MBA and during the MBA.

If you could go back to working on your MBA, what would you have done differently?

Find at least one more course outside my existing strengths to stretch myself, such as business history, operations/analytics, or marketing.

Can you describe any ways in which your MBA program was more or less rigorous — or challenging — than you expected?

The biggest challenge was the need to get out of my comfort zone and natural learning style.

Another challenge was the need to prioritize pretty strictly: which activities are most important to do this week, which case studies deserve the most attention today, and which classmates should I get to know better before we leave campus?

How, and who, did you network with within your MBA program? What advantages did that bring?

During the first year of the MBA program, you take all of your courses with your 80-person section, so most networking during that year was with the same subset of MBA classmates.

During the second year, when you're taking electives, you have to push yourself not to just hang out with the familiar faces in each classroom, but instead to find new gems with whom to interact. After realizing that, I developed some of the most important relationships that I've tapped post-MBA.

I also was fortunate to develop close relationships with many of my professors, one of whom became my most important mentor over the last 20 years, and several others of whom were key to my doctoral experiences and my faculty career since then.