Cambridge e-MBA cancelled

I received the following e-mail response to my inquiry regarding the University of Cambridge e-MBA program, which was supposed to commence this year:

Thanks for your interest concerning the MBA course in Cambridge. Unfortunately our e-MBA has been cancelled. The MBA in Cambridge is now available in two versions:
- the one year full-time program
- the two year integrated program: it means six months in Cambridge, then one year within a company and six months back in Cambridge.

Does anyone know what happened or, more specifically, what prompted the cancellation?

Regards,

JB

 

I have my suspicions. 4 or 5 years ago, Pearson announced that they were moving into the world of education bigtime. They bought Prentice-Hall for almost $500 million, our little Heriot-Watt MBA marketing business for a fraction of 1% of that, and lots more, and made all kinds of "articulation" agreements with schools, including Cambridge, Excelsior, Wharton, and others.

Pearson does have a history of buying things, then not doing anything with them. The rights to my education books are one good example. Another is (I think I remember the name correctly) Mindscape, a California game software company for which they paid something like $500 million, then sold it a year or so later for less than a quarter of that.

Now there seems to be some combination of rearranging and cutting back going on in education. The Heriot-Watt MBA (USA) has recently been moved from their Financial Times division in New York back to a new office in England. The Excelsior MBA has, as far as I can tell, never been launched. And now, we learn, the Cambridge eMBA is gone.

 

As I live only about 15 miles from Cambridge, I can remark on some of the local grumblings. The main complaint by potential students that I know was that it was not a total e-degree. Over 50% of the coursework was still going to be completed in Cambridge within their four walls. If you can do that much resident work, you might as well do it all.

 

As per the last post, being in Britain, I heard the arguements too, with the main one being that the 'E' MBA wasn't that much of an 'E', but residency time was alot, as per what the last poster mentioned.