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Weekly UpdatesIf you need a career lift and are looking for a master's in business administration with an edge, Alaska Pacific University might be worth checking out. Whatever your views of those dizzying college consumer ratings, Alaska Pacific University is drawing notice, and more B-schools (business schools) are finding glitter in the kind of traditions APU holds dear.
This private, nonprofit center of experiential education in Anchorage that was included last year in Barron's "Best Buys in College Education" is ranked 47th among master's-level universities in the West in the 2007 edition of U.S. News & World Report Guide to America's Best Colleges. Cost of the MBA degree at APU, including fees and books, ranges from $22,000 to $23,000, says Tracy Stewart, director. Some classes are taught in Austria or China.
"Alaska is a hard market," reflects Academic Dean Marilyn Barry, "and not just because we're small and spread out. You have to make an effort to come to Alaska and to stay in Alaska. These are adventurous, hardy, even aggressive types. They're not shrinking violets."
APU targets these hardy individualists with the vision of stretching and growing professionally while personalizing their studies and rubbing shoulders with others who have expertise to share.
'ACTIVE LEARNING'
Hands-on learning isn't the latest nuance here, but a matter of remaining on mission. "APU's emphasis on active-learning exhibits itself with every curricular offering," says Mike Fisher, director of the MBA emphasis in Health Services Administration. "Alaska is a community of individuals and businesses that welcomes partnering with students toward achieving the common goal of quality and practical resolutions to challenging issues.
"APU's active-learning model is years ahead of many other schools," Fisher says, and he expects the community partnerships to continue and thrive.
APU, it seems, has been known for the kinds of strengths--small classes, exceptional faculty and a collegial atmosphere--cited by BusinessWeek as helping the University of California at Berkeley's Hass School of Business break into the magazine's top 10 rankings for 2006.
At 10 to 15 students, APU class size may resemble the executive corps that many students aim to join. At an institution that also eschews a tenure system for faculty, while encouraging constant planning and goal setting, about 77 percent of the faculty hold a Ph.D. or terminal degree in their fields.
"I was trained as a theoretical economist, meaning I had powerful skills that provide little insight into anything," says Dale Lehman, who came to APU from Colorado to direct the Executive MBA emphasis in Information and Communication Technology. He has enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of teaching at APU as well as the chance to have an impact on the state's developing infrastructure, where up here, he says, "it's a matter of life and death." His program allows promising leaders already working in professional fields, who can demonstrate their ability to benefit, to be admitted to MBA studies without an undergraduate degree.
In addition to designing real-world business and marketing plans and doing leadership exercises and simulations, MBA students at APU may help manage an actual portfolio. Greg Samorajski, visiting assistant professor of global finance and management, is proud of APU's investment-management partnership program with McKinley Capital Management Inc., a global-growth specialist firm in Anchorage where he also has a desk. With vigilant oversight, students have raised a college investment fund from $200,000 to $300,000. The firm, meanwhile, has trained staff members in the program and hired a handful of its students. Also stressed at APU are internships at businesses, nonprofits and associations.
ENVIRONMENT ALSO FOCUS
And talk about green-with the Chugach Mountains as a backdrop, the APU campus contains nearly 200 wooded acres crisscrossed with trails. The university is a member of the Eco-League, a group of six small institutions with a strong environmental bent to their programs. Campus leaders like to compare the place to a garden rather than a factory. And although they're not enrolled, the moose occasionally leave calling cards.
Students appreciate the chance for more attention, and those frequent contacts with speakers. Along with quantitative and analytical skills, they are expected to develop "the ability to appropriately leverage interpersonal relationships and teamwork."
"I know the director of the program on a personal level," noted Danna Grant. Although she had a bachelor's degree in nursing science from the University of Alaska Anchorage, she started working on her MBA/Health Services Administration at APU within six months of joining Alaska Spine Institute Surgery Center, where she is nursing director, because the new program "fit in with the education advancement I was seeking."
PART-TIME TREND
Not many MBA students are full-time, carrying three or more classes; many take one or two per semester-at costs ranging from $3,500 to $7,000-and often it's evenings to accommodate work schedules. Most need two-and-a-half years to complete the required 36 credits in one of several areas; for the MBA, 12 of the 36 credits (four classes) are electives.
Total business school enrollment by head count is about 209 of APU's 800 students (or 136 of 530 full-time equivalents). Areas of MBA concentration include the basic MBA, the newer MBA/Health Services Administration, and the executive MBA/Information and Communication Technology, which tends to draw telecom, Internet and entertainment professionals.
The related Master of Global Finance (MGF), which draws from financial services or fund-management industries, is newly evolving from the MBA in global finance and currently has 16 students. Excluding the MGF, of the 86 MBA students currently, 45 are seeking general MBA, 15 on health services, and 26 in telecommunications management. Enrollment tends toward 40 percent female and 60 percent male.
ALREADY LEADERS
Many senior-level students are already known in their fields. Some come from Native and village corporations, others from the oil and gas industry. Engineers mingle with pharmaceutical sales reps, government employees and construction business owners. For students and administrators, that's part of the program's appeal.
"There are many job descriptions/ job titles that require an advanced degree and/or X years of experience," Stewart explains. "The MBA allows mid-level folks to move from supervisor to manager, from manager to executive, and from executive to a C-level type of position. The other thing we have seen from our graduates is that they are often in executive or 'C' (CEO, COO, CFO) positions without formal education or graduate education. They often seek the MBA to fill in or expand their knowledge to make their jobs easier."
Like other faculty, Fisher brought with him a diversity of "real-world" experience when he come to APU from Regis University in Colorado. Since he's interested in rural health care delivery to indigenous populations, the Alaska Tribal Health System provides a superb model, with the Rural Alaska Native Adult program offering an array of courses to remote locations. And as was the case with other faculty members, he says opportunities in Alaska for his wife, a nurse practitioner, also helped draw them north.
Here, health care is big business. Administrators say the HSA emphasis, which graduated its first MBA student this month, arose in response to a "pent-up demand" for a program bringing technical and human dimensions together.
Personally experiencing 10 to 15 students deep in debate, talking from both clinical and administrative sides of medicine, can't be replicated online, asserts Mary Rydesky, an instructor in health services. The breaking down of barriers that occurs "will change the face of health care in Alaska," she says, ultimately influencing efficiencies and improving the continuity of care-for instance, when a patient leaves a village for care in the city, a familiar scenario here.
Sukanto Bhattacharya, MFG director, came to APU in 2005 from Melbourne, Australia. While his peers are quick to say APU was lucky to get him, back at Deakin University there, another "outside-of-the-box" institution, he might have had 135 students to a single class, in contrast to the 1:12 faculty-to-student ratio here. Here a special finance lab equipped with Bloomberg terminals is available to students in his applied finance program.
LIMITED ONLINE CLASSES
Although the business master's program is offering a couple of finance classes online this semester for the first time, the MBA isn't likely to go mainly online anytime soon. The most successful model of that nature has been at the University of Phoenix, where course content created by a small group of professors is delivered by adjuncts, notes Lehman, MBA/ICT director. "I'd leave academia in a minute if I had to teach in that model," he adds.
Rydesky sees an expanded role for distance training of professionals in rural areas through live video communication, and although Barry doesn't dispute the demand for instruction methods that give students more control of their time, in Alaska, she reflects, the limits of growth also are shaped by technological capabilities in the field.
Within the Pacific region, as administrators see it, APU occupies a carefully identified niche. Basically, APU did its homework in balancing demand and what already was available at the University of Alaska; the University of Phoenix, with its online emphasis; the University of Washington's executive MBA program, in which students congregate once a month for a weekend; and the Anchorage campus of Wayland Baptist University.
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