"Is the MBA Obsolete" and SJCME

That is an excellent question! It is suppose to mean Master of Business Administration, in which one would have a vast knowledge of all business concepts and the administration of such.

It appears all schools can define what an MBA is for themselves. Unless of course the school has professional accreditation(PA).Then they would have to adhere to the PA guidelines. This of course is seen as a flaw by some. The issue is Regional Accreditation(RA) does not generally accredit programs but they accredit Colleges and Universities. This means that if a University gets NEASC(New England Association of Schools and Colleges) accreditation then all the programs fall under the umbrella. In other words just because it's an RA MBA doesn't make it a fabulous program. I could create an RA MBA program and require four business courses and insist the rest be Humanities electives. Granted it is still an MBA program, just not what people think of or expect an MBA's background to be.


-disclaimer:
This not to say there isn't some excellent RA only MBA programs out there! I am merely pointing out that some may be better than others and I still think RA is Very desirable,but would suggest looking at PA programs as well.

 

I am not a hardcore "business guy" although I am a manager. I believe that I understand what the St. Josephs people are doing with their MBA program and while I'm not prepared to say they're "wrong," I can say that if I were to ever enroll in an MBA program (I won't) I would definitely want to have some training in quantitative methods. I may not want it to be the focus of the program but I want to have some of it. I also think that many MBA programs neglect what I believe are referred to as the "soft skills."
Jack

 

This is an interesting question.

Going back to when I was looking for an MBA degree, I would expect a good balance and coverage over organisational behaviour, (financial and management) accounting, finance, economics, marketing, strategy, operation management, information systems, and some quant skills, and finally some electives to further specialise or diversify my business knowledge.

Although I believe my quant skill is pretty good, I would still expect some of it in the programme.

Out of discussing from another thread, would there be a Master of Liberial Arts in Business Administration? both MLA and MBA aims at a good balance of knowledge. It would be interesting to know what it would be.

 

An MBA does help when one goes up the ladder. The non-technical skills that are a requirement can only be learned via an MBA !!. My 2 cents.