B School Confidential

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

  If Texas A&M's small but high-quality graduate business program had a slogan, it would have to be "Extreme Teamwork." Group dynamics is central to the MBA experience at the Mays School. While team building and team-based learning are common elements of most programs today, Aggie MBAs take it further than most. In fact, personal interviews are now required to assess prospective students' ability to work together.

From the day new MBA candidates arrive on campus they are assigned to a team of five or six students (designed to maximize diversity) with whom they'll partner through the first semester. The semester kicks off with Challenge Week, in which new teams must pull together to tackle an outdoor ropes course, solve a murder mystery, and compete against other teams in management exercises. "The amount of encouragement you get from your teammates is tremendous," says Randy Wood, a certified public accountant who left a Houston insurance company to pursue an MBA at A&M. The point, of course, is to prepare Mays MBAs to work effectively on teams in a corporate environment after graduation. Throughout the first semester, the core courses incorporate two major team efforts: a corporate financial forecasting project and a competitive consulting project, in which the teams analyze multiple issues at a Fortune 500 company and develop recommendations.

With a total enrollment of only 181, the Mays MBA program pales by comparison to A&M proper, whose student body numbers some 43,000. But rather than get lost in the crowd, MBA candidates get plenty of personal attention. "The size is key," says Steve Long, who graduated in May and now works at Nortel as a financial analyst in the company's financial leadership development program. Long and his classmates say they appreciate the faculty's willingness to listen to their ideas regarding the direction of the program. They also like the easy access to elective courses.

And they love the technology. What the Mays School lacks in charm--compared with, say, the gracious Georgian architecture of SMU's Cox School--it makes up for in facilities. Its four-year-old building on the western edge of campus is crammed full of the latest gadgets and tools of the trade: The Experiential Learning Lab, the Masters Computer Lab, and multimedia, networking, and systems application program labs are all state-of-the-art facilities. Computerworld magazine recently ranked A&M's TechnoMBA program the nation's eleventh best.

If the equipment is newer, the students are older: By design the Mays MBA program these days attracts a more experienced group of students. In the class of 2000, for instance, the average age is 28, up from 25.6 only a few years ago. That class was also the first to have a minimum two-year work requirement for admission, although entering students already have on average more than four years on the job. The emphasis on experience has paid off in the classroom--where students bring their diverse real-world expertise to discussions--as well as after graduation: The average starting salary for 1998 grads was $63,100, which is particularly impressive when you consider how cheap it was to get the degree in the first place. Business Week named the Mays program the nation's sixth-best MBA value and among the top five in terms of return on educational investment.

Of course, it's the other ranking that really counts. In 1999 Mays placed thirty-sixth on the U.S. News list and made the unranked bottom half of Business Week's survey of the nation's fifty best MBA programs. That doesn't sit well with Cocanougher, the school's dean. "Our stated goal is to be in the top-ten public business programs in the U.S.," he says. "We're well in reach of that."