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An explosion of online business courses is prompting some students to ask: What’s the ROI for free classes?
Schools like the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Business have attracted thousands of people to free or low-cost digital versions of courses taken by full-time, two-year M.B.A. students. Classes such as “Selling Ideas” and “People Analytics,” two current Wharton offerings, have helped schools win attention and revenue at a time of waning interest in the flagship M.B.A. degree.
“It used to be the case that an M.B.A. from a top school was a golden passport to professional success, and a few universities had a monopoly on the credential,” said Bill Aulet, who teaches entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, which offers a suite of free classes online. Those credentials matter less now that online learning and nonuniversity training have widened access to skills that once came only with an M.B.A., he said.
For learners, though, the career payoff remains unclear as many new certificates have been untested in the job market, giving the credential less sway than a traditional B-school degree.
Still, students in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, tend to be further along in their careers and not immediately interested in an M.B.A., said Anne Trumbore, Wharton’s senior director of online learning. In a recent survey of 4,650 of the school’s online learners, roughly two-thirds were located outside the U.S., and around 60% were seeking to advance their careers.
Wharton has enrolled nearly one million professional learners since 2015. Around 100,000 of those have taken individual courses or strung together a series of classes to earn credentials such as a professional certificate in digital marketing, paying up to $600 a course. By contrast, the school each year graduates 900 M.B.A. students, who pay about $250,000 for their degrees.
Harvard Business School, meanwhile, charges up to $1,500 for eight-week classes like “Becoming a Better Manager” via HBX, its online learning platform. HBX revenue doubled to $10 million last year, according to the school’s most recent financial statement.
“MOOCs have found their audience, and it’s professional learners seeking career-related credentials,” said Dhawal Shah, who has run the course search engine Class Central since 2011. The strong brands of top business schools like Harvard and Wharton carry special weight in the increasingly crowded online educational market, he added.
Laurie Pickard began taking free M.B.A.-level courses online while working as an international development specialist in Rwanda in 2013. Ms. Pickard, now 36 years old, chronicled her free coursework from schools like Wharton and University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business on her blog, No-Pay M.B.A.
Over three years, she amassed an online following, along with multiple certificates, but no degree. In 2015, Ms. Pickard was promoted — in part, she says, because her employers were impressed by her new business acumen.
M.B.A. grads get a median base salary boost of around $30,000, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the traditional B-school entrance exam. Calculating the return on low-cost online classes is harder.
“There seems to be a certification for everything these days, from facilitation to surface engineering, and it’s harder and harder to gauge what someone has learned,” said Anthony Gagliardo, director of human resources at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
A study of more than 17 million online job listings found that of 2,500 certifications requested by employers, the most commonly sought were those awarded by industry associations, not schools.
“The fact that employers almost never ask for most certificates raises questions about whether people are pursuing a credential that actually has currency in the market,” said Matt Sigelman, chief executive of Burning Glass Technologies, a labor-market data firm that conducted the analysis.
Even so, business-school leaders are pushing further with online courses to raise both revenue and visibility. A recent GMAC survey found that 8% of prospective business school students said they had completed at least one online course, compared with 6% the year before.
“We’re reaching people who would never show up on our doorstep if Wharton only had an in-person program,” Ms. Trumbore said.
Credit: By Kelsey Gee
Word count: 680
(c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
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