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After a sex abuse scandal rippled through the Catholic Church, Boston College’s Carroll School of Management wanted to make a positive change. The school introduced a dual-degree program that coupled an MBA with a master’s in pastoral ministry. The goal was to promote transparency and human resource prowess at the highest ranks of religious institutions. Only one graduate has emerged from the program since it started in 2006. Even so, administrators consider it a success.
“It’s a small contribution and certainly not a far-reaching one,” says Thomas Groome, a professor of theology and religious education at the Jesuit university. “It is at least raising the conversation and alerting people to the need for good management.”
When it comes to rolling out dual-degree programs, business schools appear to be defying the laws of supply and demand. Dual MBA degree tracks have proliferated widely, giving rise to unexpected combinations such as the Boston College program, New York University’s MBA with a master of fine arts degree in film production, and Yale’s MBA pairing with a master’s in architecture.
Despite the explosive growth in dual tracks, very few students enroll in them. The greater number of options means more applicants must decide if they are best suited for a specialized dual degree, another masters degree program, or a regular MBA. Business schools, on the other hand, make the case that even though few MBA students enroll in dual-degree programs, the offerings provide additional educational options for students, help distinguish the school, and strengthen its ties with industry.
“For us, it’s not a strategy for growing but a strategy for increasing quality,” says Jeffrey Ringuest, Carroll’s associate dean for graduate programs.
The number of dual MBA degrees available has surged 54 percent over the past decade. Yet the portion of MBA students enrolled in dual-degree tracks has never risen above 1 percent, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, which started collecting dual-degree enrollment data in 2005. In fact, that percentage has shrunk, from about 0.9 percent of MBA students in 2005-06 to 0.7 percent in 2010-11.
When compared with regular MBAs, dual-degree candidates don’t always see a higher return on their investment, according to data collected by PayScale, which gathers information from online pay-comparison tools. While adding an MBA increases the earning power of a non-MBA degree, adding a non-MBA degree may not increase the earning power of an MBA. In fact, only dual MBAs with a masters in engineering or a JD (the Juris Doctor law degree) had higher median salaries ($105,000 and $104,000, respectively) when compared with regular MBAs ($82,000). Those who had an MBA and a master’s degree in public health had a median salary of $81,500, and those with a master’s in education, $64,100. The PayScale sample was based on graduates with a total of seven to nine years of work experience and was collected from November 2009 to 2011.
Since dual-degree programs typically take anywhere from an additional semester to an additional year to complete, the cost of such programs is higher, and the true return on investment may be even less than the salary figures would suggest.
“I think it is challenging, if not impossible, to make an economic case for getting both degrees,” says Andrew Allison, who graduated with a JD-MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2010. “That’s not the way I was thinking about it.”
Allison was working in New York City public schools when an interest in law drew him to graduate school in 2006. With analytic business skills becoming more critical for careers in many industries, Allison also decided to pursue an MBA. “I concluded that getting two degrees vs. getting one might not have a measureable impact on my earnings potential,” he says. “But it would have a measureable impact on my ability to make a contribution.”
