“The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself.” And for legendary investor Warren Buffett, education is a more reliable route to wealth than Bitcoin. “The more you learn, the more you earn.”
Business education has seen a huge rise in demand since Covid-19 turned the world upside down last year, both for the full-time MBA and a wide range of specialized Master’s programs. But with so many of us coming to terms with working remotely, and schools themselves pushed towards digital delivery of their courses, there are more people than ever considering an online MBA or Master’s.
“The pandemic has changed people’s perceptions, and opened their minds to the possibility of remote learning,” says Federico Frattini, dean of MIP Politecnico di Milano. “We know that the future of work is going to be more agile and flexible, and far more reliant on digital technologies. The same is true for the future of learning.”
Thanks to people like Frattini, online learning at MIP Politcenico Di Milano is so much more than just Zoom and PowerPoint slides. He and his colleagues have built one of the best digital offerings for business education in the form of the i-Flex program. The Milan-based institution was one of only seven schools outside of the U.S. to have its digital alternative to the flagship MBA ranked in the Financial Times’ 2021 Online MBA Ranking, published in March. slot wallet
Featuring alongside the business schools of Warwick, IE, Imperial and Durham, this year’s ranking of the top providers of Online MBAs marks a significant achievement for the Italian institution, with the i-Flex climbing to 8th place.
With the backdrop of the last 16 months of a global pandemic, it has been a boom year for the Online MBA market. Applications surged by 43.5 percent in 2020, according to the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC).
What started out over thirty years ago as a niche alternative offered by for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University, is quickly becoming a focus for top ranked business schools such as Michigan Ross, CMU Tepper, USC Marshall, Indiana Kelley and UNC Kenan Flagler.
For the best coverage of the US market in online MBAs, Poets&Quants publishes an annual ranking that now includes close to 50 programs.
