More and more good MBA programs are shutting-down.

Among other format i.e. 2 year MBA, EMBA, online-MBA, the 2 year residential full-time MBA is the format that is most incompatible to future of works and careers.

Penn State’s Smeal College of Business To Downsize Its MBA From 2 Years To 1

Penn State’s Smeal College of Business announced on Monday (August 22) that it will close its two-year residential MBA program in 2024. The cohort admitted in fall 2022 will be the program’s last.

Instead, the business school will transition to a one-year MBA with a STEM designation beginning in fall of 2023. The new program will also replace Smeal’s one-year master’s degree in management and organizational leadership.

It is the latest prominent school to shutter its two-year, residential MBA program in the last several years. The University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business announced in 2017 that it was admitting its last full-time cohort in 2019, focusing instead on growing its part-time program and specialized masters offerings. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Gies eliminated both its full- and part-time MBA programs in 2019, devoting more resources to its disruptive online MBA program. Wake Forest exited the full-time market in 2014 after enrollments there fell from 144 in 2009 to 114 five years later. Virginia Tech and Simmons College have also shut down their full-time, on-campus MBA programs in recent years.

FOR SMEAL, A ‘FINANCIALLY RESPONSIBLE’ DECISION
Smeal’s full time program admitted 98 students in 2021, while enrolling 55 for the 2023 cohort. Its yield (the number of students accepting admission and enrolling in the program) dropped from 67.1% in 2019 to 56.1% in 2021.
https://poetsandquants.com/2022/08/23/penn-states-smeal-college-of-business-to-shutter-its-2-year-mba/

I think different schools are in different positions here. Still, two common factors can be seen for many schools exiting the full-time MBA market.

1. One is that state universities have declining funding and full-time MBAs are almost all loss-making and have both a higher minimum economic scale than pre-experience degrees, and poorer economies of scale. If you are losing money on your full-time MBA and then lose most of your in-state demand it's very hard to defend maintaining support for it.

2. The second case is niche programs focused on topics that are mainstreaming. USC and Thunderbird were leaders for international business when, even 20 years ago, major schools were very weak at that. Simmons is a school developed for women leaders, but today it's not only Harvard, Kellogg, Stanford and Wharton that are close to gender parity in their cohort, but even more quant and STEM-oriented schools like MIT, Rochester, Toronto and Washington. The demand for an MBA for women is reduced. Similarly, US schools lagged a long way behind Canada and Europe on sustainability, so there was a market for programs like the award-winning Bainbridge MBA in sustainability -and for donors and partners to support them. Now, this is full in the mainstream of business schools.