The 2009 Guide to MBAs in B.C.
Career in a rut? Looking to take your business global? Want to put your spare hours to good use? Earning an MBA no longer means spending two years poring over case studies: there’s a specialization for every need, and part-time and online options to suit every schedule.
Back in the ’90s, if you wanted an MBA in B.C., you had just three options: UBC, SFU or UVic. Since then a proliferation of new universities and delivery options has opened up a whole new array of choices.
A couple of new universities arrived on the scene in the ’90s, with their own MBA programs, and a handful of junior colleges have been promoted to university status, some of them developing their own MBAs along the way. The increased competition has spurred a multitude of specializations, both at the original three universities and the newcomers.
Looking for an MBA specializing in technology? How about law, human resources or health care? No problem; there’s a graduate business degree for every specialty. And gone are the days when advancing your credentials meant taking 18 months out of your career to sit in a classroom. Local MBA options range from full-time classroom learning to entirely online courses, with varying residency options in between.
One of the relative newcomers is Thompson Rivers University, which graduated from University College of the Cariboo in 2004 and began offering its MBA in 2005. The Kamloops school has become quite a draw for international students, with about half its student population coming to class from outside the country. School of Business dean Murray Young attributes the international mix to a network of international agents steering undergrads toward the Kamloops campus. Many of those students stay on for graduate degrees or go home and spread the word about what Young describes as the university’s exceptional “customer service.”
Over on Vancouver Island, the newly renamed Vancouver Island University is seeing its first MBA cohort make its way into the workforce. The former Malaspina University College has granted a joint degree with the U.K.’s University of Hertfordshire since 2002; then in 2007 it began delivering its own MBA, alongside a master of science in international business from Hertfordshire. Retaining ties to the U.K. university gives an international dimension to the newly minted university’s MBA program.
While hardly a newcomer, the province’s only private Christian university continues to hone the non-denominational MBA it has been offering since 2006. Trinity Western University in Langley infuses its MBA program with an ethical component, promising students a program that challenges them to not only examine new ways of doing business but to approach each learning module with questions about doing business ethically.
Settling in to his second year as dean of the Faculty of Management at Royal Roads University, Pedro Márquez is putting his stamp on the university’s MBA program. Márquez reports that he’s overhauling the program with the aim of breaking down barriers. Instead of offering marketing, accounting, human resources, etc., as separate classes, the revised core program will be built around guiding principles, such as leadership and sustainability, and will use those as filters through which individual skills are sifted. The revised format won’t take effect before 2010, and it won’t change the course length or residency requirements.
Also on the island, University Canada West is under new ownership. When former UVic president David Strong opened the private university in 2005, an MBA and executive MBA program were among the original offerings. After running into financial difficulty, the school was sold in November last year to Eminata Group, an education conglomerate based in Vancouver that has 800 employees and 30 campuses.
The change of ownership has not affected the MBA program, according to Eminata vice-president Royden Trainor, except to offer back-office support for what the school was already doing. The university is working on responding to increased demand for flexibility by strengthening its recognition of prior education and work experience, and by beefing up its online delivery component, says Trainor. Future plans include developing “a virtual environment” that will replace the current residency requirement.
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