The Fogelman College of Business & Economics is pleased to announce the launch of a customer-driven, full-time MBA program that will begin in the Fall of 2009. This program will help companies (the customers!) overcome the problem of talent shortage by participating in the recruitment and education of high-caliber students.
This MBA program, with its unique features, will attract top students from around the world. Its set of core courses in the key business disciplines will have an international focus that will prepare the students for today’s competitive global landscape. In addition, the students will be specifically recruited to enroll in one of several sets of four specialty courses designed with the needs of Memphis businesses in mind. In fact, Memphis companies will sponsor the students, making it a mutually attractive arrangement. Initially, the specialty areas will be biomedical, to support the Memphis medical devices industry, marketing, to support the package shipping industry, and entrepreneurship. Here are the details.
Companies will sponsor MBA students with $30,000/year, two-year assistantships. This will cover the students’ tuition and a stipend of $36,000 over the twenty-one month period of the program. In return for this support, students will be responsible for ten hours of project and research work per week during the four semesters of the program and forty hours per week during the intervening summer. The sponsoring companies will be encouraged to provide input into curriculum content of the specialty courses and will be invited to have their executives and technical personnel guest lecture in the courses. At the end of the program, the expectation is that the companies will offer the students full-time employment.
In the words of the Fogelman College’s new dean, Dr. Rajiv Grover, “This program is a significant win-win-win strategy for companies, the students, and the university. For the sponsoring companies, the benefits of just the hours spent by students on company projects balance the costs incurred by the companies in sponsoring the students. On top of that, companies will not incur recruitment and training costs – they get MBAs who can hit the ground running. For students, it is a win because their graduate education is funded and they have a chance of employment at a great Memphis company. For the university, the ability to attract top students is a significant win. We are targeting some companies within an industry and some other companies in the Memphis area and the response has been very encouraging. We hope to build a robust full-time MBA class.”
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