Bauer News - New Dean and Freeze of FT MBA

Academic Excellence
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Gang,

Good news: Dr. Xianjun Geng, from Tulane (AD) is the new Dean of Bauer. Link Link Link Link

Bad news: Bauer is putting a permanent freeze on the Full Time MBA. Link Link

Texas (Southwest and West Coast regional) and Rice (Texas) are the only two highly recruited full time programs with SMU as a Dallas only option. I get why UH is doing this, but hopefully it can recapture its mission to go back out to market, in the future. Probably won’t, but I’m concerned at the long term reputational risk. I kind of think UH squandered Ted Bauer’s endowment without having a bold plan until Pavlou showed up. For example,UH had its investment simulator three years before Texas did (both funded by Ted and Invesco alumni).

Honestly, I’m surprised we didn’t get James Weston from Rice given his background at a rising program and his stature as a Finance academic, but Geng has a similar background in MIS (the star for Bauer academics) to the outgoing Dean Pavlou.

Wild times in 2025.

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So wait.

Bauer is going to ONLY a part-time MBA. I don’t like that.

What about law students in the joint JD/MBA? They used to go to school full-time and do BOTH degrees.

The law school is mostly full time; they admit only one part-time section per year against 3/4 full-time.

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It’s been a national trend. University of Illinois, university of Iowa, Wake Forest, Virginia Tech and Purdue have all paused or scrapped their full time MBA programs for online and part-time options.

The reality is that many (very good) universities are having challenges recruiting MBA students.

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Glad that isn’t a law school trend.

Aren’t the top ten MBA programs like Harvard, Stanford, and Penn all strictly full-time?

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They can do the MBA portion at night and the Law portion during the day.

The part time MBA is broken into Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday cohorts.

It’s not bad at all

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Again though. Aren’t the top MBA programs (Harvard, Stanford, Penn) strictly full-time?

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Our market is the working professional that got their undergrad elsewhere and started their professional career in Houston and found UH’s Part Time MBA program to be incredibly convenient and manageable.

That was probably 90-95% of my class in the part time program. Only a few of us had our undergraduate degree from UH and we all had full time jobs.

Just a different type of student than what the Harvard/ Stanford/ Penn State type of students are looking for. So, their market reach is reversed. Those going to those Universities are not juggling a full time job with it.

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Penn (Ivy League)

Not Penn State (B1G)

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Ivy League Students typically don’t hold a desk job while going to Grad School.

They typically have the means to focus solely on the highly competitive program they are in

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Yes, that’s correct. It seems like if you’re not an elite business school, then the trends for other business schools (even business schools for universities with stellar reputations like I mentioned) are for them to cut their full-time MBA programs and strengthen their part-time and online options.

Money and a dwindling talent pool is forcing even great schools to make tough choices.

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The dual program information is still up for the Law Center, but removed from Bauer.

This looks like a poor implementation. This dual program was the way for Coogs to have a better way of getting into M&A or IB roles.

I thought about investigating the PT MBA + PT JD, but looks like that isn’t an option… yet?

So lame.

I think the biggest issue for the MBA at Bauer is that they’ve focused so much on undergraduate outcomes through their job recruitment office. The FT outcomes are not as impressive for a program like this one. The curriculum design is very good compared to other schools. Even if they retooled the FT to offer Top 25 B-school outcomes with a population of 50-75 students, the PT could remain humming at 500-1,000 students. That’s what UCLA, NYU, USC, Indiana and other prospective peer institutions do.

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