Questrom School of Business’ online MBA courses are taught by Questrom faculty, and the program is priced competitively at $25,000—two factors that appeal to mid-career professionals. Photo courtesy of Questrom School of Business

Business & Law

BU’s Online MBA Program Offers Professionals More than Business Fundamentals

Having just celebrated its fifth anniversary, Questrom’s OMBA program that combines real-world insights with collaborative learning boasts over 3,000 alumni worldwide

For years, Amy Graff felt like she was on call to solve challenges. As an advertising professional and then as a consultant, she would be called upon to swoop in—sometimes at the eleventh hour—to help a business that was struggling to find its audience, or find its footing. 

A naturally curious and creative person, Graff (Questrom’25) appreciated the outside-the-box thinking these roles required of her. But she always felt like she was missing a piece of the bigger picture. 

“I found myself asking: ‘Why did our team really get called in? What’s the deeper challenge here?’ I felt like I was missing some of the business context,” she says. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic brought much of normal life to a screeching halt, Graff, like many around the world, suddenly found she had some extra time on her hands. Based in Chicago, she felt lucky to be healthy, and employed, and started wondering what more she could do. 

Almost 800 miles away, in eastern Pennsylvania, Raymond Makharadze Ortiz (Questrom’25) was finding that the pandemic and its related shutdowns offered a similarly unexpected window of opportunity. 

Ortiz, a project manager in a healthcare setting, had for some time been considering the next step in his career. Every time he considered further education or a professional development opportunity, though, it seemed like life always had other plans. For him, the pandemic was a rare moment of stability, Ortiz says, paradox though that may be. 

Looking for new skills and a deeper understanding of the engine humming beneath businesses large and small, Graff and Ortiz both enrolled in the Online Master of Business Administration (OMBA) program at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. 

The two-year program, designed for mid-career professionals such as Graff and Ortiz, combines real-world insights and industry practices with an engaging, collaborative approach to learning so that students graduate ready to grow as leaders in their professions. The OMBA program celebrated its fifth anniversary last fall, and already boasts an alumni network more than 3,000 strong, working at companies such as Google, Pfizer, MetLife, Disney, and more. 

“When we announced this program in January 2019, our original target was 200 students,” says Liz Wagoner, senior director of online MBA admissions at Questrom. “By that March, we already had 400 people enrolled, and it just grew from there.” 

Wagoner estimates that the program brings in about 600 people per term now. And the strong candidates who aren’t accepted right away are admitted to a later term, she adds. 

“We are actively trying to make this as accessible as possible for as many people as possible, because we know that it can really change lives,” Wagoner says. 

Part of the program’s draw is its innovative approach to the curriculum, organizers say.

“Typically, online MBA programs look like this: schools take their existing MBA curriculum, put it online, and charge the same price,” says Paul Carlile, who was among the architects of the OMBA program. “We did something different.” 

Carlile is also the Peter and Deborah Wexler Professor of Management and Information Systems and the senior associate dean for research and innovation at Questrom. One of his areas of research is known as open innovation—a concept that assumes innovation is “evenly distributed across the world,” Carlile says, rather than concentrated only in research and development offices, for example. 

“There is no difference between innovation and learning, because innovation is a context of learning,” Carlile says. “And so I thought, that’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to create an open innovation–based way of doing an MBA.”

In most residential MBA programs, “there’s an accounting class, there’s a finance class, there’s a statistics class, and you take those in order,” Carlile says. This works well for full-time students with minimal professional experience, because it builds a strong foundation. But working professionals based in cities around the world need something more collaborative and more dynamic. 

The two-year program is divided into six modules, each of which pulls from those traditional disciplines, but blends them together to teach real-world scenarios students may actually encounter. For example, Carlile says, the second module deals with using data to manage performance. 

“I didn’t say the word accounting, didn’t say the word finance, didn’t say the word statistics, but they’re all in there,” he says. 

The courses are taught by Questrom faculty, and the program is priced competitively at $25,000—two factors that appealed to both Graff and Ortiz, they say. 

“After years and years and years of considering graduate school and doing bits and pieces of professional education, I found the OMBA program, and thought, this is the right program at the right price point and the right level of effort—and not having to leave the workforce and go into a massive amount of debt to do it,” Graff says. 

She and Ortiz graduated recently with their MBAs from Questrom , and say that they gained much more than a straightforward education through the program. 

“One of the things I didn’t expect is the network I came away with,” Ortiz says. “You build relationships with professors and other people all around the world, and the amount of doors that open just from building that network is amazing. Your resume is great, but your network is the real ticket, and the OMBA network is awesome.”