B-Schools Confront the High Cost of Change

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"Over time we hope it will allow us to build new and better facilities for students, and we'll put a lot more money into student aid. It's a new world for us."

The University of Wyoming's MBA program is going through a similar transformation, and for Dean Hathaway, it can't come soon enough. The MBA model that Wyoming had been using was old-fashioned, or "simple," as Hathaway puts it. Students would take classes, get a little help with recruiting, and tailor a few papers toward the industry or sector they were interested in. At the end, they would go out and look for a job. "We needed to radically change our model," he says.

But Hathaway and his team first had to convince the university and state legislature that a major tuition boost in the MBA program was necessary. In the past two years, MBA administrators have been developing a plan for what a new MBA program would look like. Included was the addition of a multilayered orientation at the front end of the program with various team-building activities weaved in. It's something nearly every other MBA program already does. But Hathaway's program simply couldn't afford to do it. "We have some of the most pristine country in the world right out our back door, and we weren't using it because it was too expensive," he says.

Wyoming's Redesigned MBA

Also included in the proposal was an integrated approach to teaching, which means throwing out the traditional academic silos in favor of business classes that use the same case studies and faculty members across various courses. A required summer consulting project also was proposed, where small groups of students would work with companies in nearby cities such as Denver and Salt Lake City to solve real problems with the oversight of a faculty member.

In late November, the university's board of trustees passed the tuition increase. The new MBA program will launch this fall to coincide with the opening of a new MBA facility. For nonresident students, tuition at the Wyoming MBA program will rise from $523 per credit hour to $726, a 39% increase. For in-state students, the change is more radical, going from $183 per credit hour to $509, a 178% jump.

For students already enrolled in the program, the university will use government stimulus funds to off-set the tuition increases. Hathaway has received some pushback from applicants already in the queue about the increases, but for the most part, the reaction has been positive. "I think most students are pretty thrilled about what they'll be getting in the new, redesigned MBA," he says.

Thanks to the countercyclical nature of MBA admissions with regard to the economy, which promises to keep applications surging until the recovery is under way, Hathaway feels the timing is perfect for launching the program. "It's a good time to be rebranding our college," he says.

Gloeckler is a staff editor for BusinessWeek in New York.

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