Elon MBA earns top honors from Bloomberg Businessweek

The part-time program is ranked #1 in the South and #5 in the nation by the leading business publication.

Bloomberg Businessweek ranks Elon’s part-time MBA program #1 in the South and #5 in the nation, with high marks in student satisfaction and an A+ grade in curriculum.

The 2013 ranking notes that more than half of recent Elon MBA graduates reported a salary increase, with the average increase amounting to 28 percent. The average completion rate for the program is 91 percent. The average class size is listed at 24 and the caliber of classmates in the program is rated an “A.” The program is rated best for career advancers. The program cost listed at $798 per credit hour is far below the cost of other top schools in the ranking.

Click here to access the ranking.

“I was especially pleased to see that the students gave the program an A+ for curriculum,” said Elon MBA progam director Bill Burpitt. “We regularly survey students to determine what we can do to improve. We have added new courses such as analytics and consumer research to give students choices in subject areas that are relevant, rigorous and immediately applicable to their work.”

Bloomberg Businessweek noted that Elon retained its #1 spot in the South from the 2011 ranking, and said that Elon’s program “won high marks in student satisfaction, and grads raved that the contemporary curriculum made it possible to take classroom material learned in the evening and apply it at work the following day.”

The Bloomberg Businessweek ranking of part-time MBA programs is based on a survey of recent graduates, an academic quality measure that combines six school-reported data points—including average GMAT scores, class sizes, and completion rates—and a calculation of post-MBA outcomes. The biennial part-time ranking, first conducted in 2007, is unique in that it separates schools into six geographic regions, and ranks each separately, as the traditional format of a part-time MBA program does not lend itself to traveling long distances multiple times a week.

Elon is ranked along with many of the nation’s finest business schools. Here are the top 10 schools in the 2013 Bloomberg Businessweek part-time MBA ranking:

1. Carnegie Mellon University
2. University of California at Berkeley
3. Southern Methodist University
4. UCLA
5. Elon University (Martha and Spencer Love School of Business)
6. Loyola Marymount University
7. Rice University
8. University of Chicago
9. Rollins College
10. University of Michigan

Other North Carolina part-time MBA programs ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek include the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (#13), North Carolina State University (#20), Wake Forest University (#27) and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (#33).