Cornell to Add Masters in Management

Cornell Business has a new Masters in Management, or MiM, program in the works, Business Because has revealed. Plans are currently underway for Cornell to become the latest United States school with an MiM offering in 2017.

With the launch of the program, Cornell will become part of a larger trend. The MiM, a general management degree popular in Europe, has been on the rise in the United States the last few years.

A few top U.S. schools like Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business have launched MiM programs of their own recently, but European schools overwhelmingly dominate MiM rankings like the one from Financial Times.

Still, more and more students not just in Europe but around the world are seeing the MiM as an attractive alternative to the MBA, and the MiM has been gaining ground internationally.

Compared to the MBA, the MiM typically requires little or no work experience, and the average age of MiM students is younger. Moreover, the degree tends to take less time to complete, making it a degree with that can have an early-career impact.

Mark Nelson, dean of Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, told Business Because that Cornell’s MiM will be “approximately one year.”

The details of the program are still being hashed out, and Nelson said the school hasn’t decided whether MiM students will earn one general degree or choose from specialized tracks. But the program will be finalized in time to enroll the first cohort in Fall 2018.

The cost of tuition also hasn’t been announced. However, one-year MiMs are less expensive than two-year MBAs, another factor contributing to their growing popularity.

Thanks to the shorter program length, lower cost of tuition, and more relaxed requirements on pre-enrollment experience, business students in the United States are increasingly taking note of the MiM as a plausible alternative to the MBA.

According to Amy Dittmar, professor of finance and senior associate dean of graduate programs at Ross, the school’s MiM program, launched in 2013, has been met with enthusiasm, with applications increasing by a quarter last year.

“A large number of students come out of undergrad and are looking for some additional business acumen to add onto their degrees,” she told Business Because.

This ability of the MiM to make a difference immediately after college, from the outset of students’ careers, is one reason that Cornell is betting on the degree – and that more U.S. schools are likely to follow in the footsteps of early adopters like Cornell and Ross in the future.