https://news.athabascau.ca/announcements/au-achieves-gold-standard-for-business-schools/ Their MBA is pretty expensive. MBA is $1000+ per credit hour so it ends up being 48-52K CAD (38-41K USD) depending on whether you do a capstone or not. About 10% of that cost is a mandatory "in-residence." Given there are much cheaper AACSB options, AU only makes sense if you insist on a Canadian credential.
Is this the first online university (as opposed to a brick and mortar offering online programs) the AACSB has accredited?
Once upon a time I looked at their doctoral program in distance education, but the cost was an immediate deal breaker.
I've gone through quite a number of the 90-odd pages of AACSB listings. I was unable to find ANY other North American Distance only schools. Can't say, re: overseas ones but you CAN click on the individual entries (school crest) and see the modes of instruction ... I've done pages 1-24 and 76-94 (the end). The middle belongs to you. The link is here: https://www.aacsb.edu/accredited?page=25
I tried myself, but wound up finding it tiresome and gave up. It was not a fruitless endeavor however. I could not recognize something like 80% of the schools on that list. That gives me hope that my upcoming MBA has a chance at falling somewhere in the middle of the shuffle of all the schools that nobody has ever heard of, and that it won't make a lick of difference that I didn't go to a school with a ranking and premium accreditation.
If a person wanted to only look at the U.S. and Canada, you could have checked the "Exclusively Online," "Primarily Online," and "Non-Digital Distance Education" boxes. The U.S. will have 350 results (35 pages), and Canada will have seven results. Since there are not many 100% online public universities, and I can't think of one that has AACSB accreditation, you can further reduce the results by checking the "private" box.
Georgia Southwestern has AACSB all online MBA and affordable at around 9k usd. Wasn't worth 3x HAU for the AACSB for me, YMMV.
You'll be fine If a hiring manager is a snob about it, they will be a snob for a top 50 type program. That means 20-40x more than our MBA. Totally different use xase
There are several 100% online, AACSB-accredited MBA programs for under $20k, but they're at brick and mortar universities.
Athabasca is in a position to do what other primarily online institutions can't do. They spend millions each year on research. So, despite offering mostly online classes, they operate like a traditional research university. They also have full-time professors with doctoral degrees. TESU, for comparison, mostly relies upon part-time instructors.
