MBAs: Not Just for Business Majors

Tom Gillespie was worried. He had worked his way up from a staffer at a group home to a program director for eight homes. He knew that further advancement would require an MBA, but his undergraduate degree was in psychology and his transcript was bereft of business courses.

Two years later and in the middle of Concordia University’s evening MBA program, he can laugh: “It’s hard, to be sure, but I didn’t really need to be worried at all.” As Gillespie discovered, business experience can trump academic credentials.

Gillespie is anything but a rarity or a “non-traditional” MBA student. In fact, around 50 percent of the students in MBA programs in the Twin Cities have no academic background in business—they haven’t taken courses in accounting, economics, finance, or marketing.

According to Carol Rinkoff, former chair of Concordia’s MBA program, a visitor to Concordia’s program would not be able to pick out students like Gillespie from students who have undergraduate business degrees. Most MBA admissions directors don’t even consider the specific degree on a transcript when screening potential candidates, according to Kathryn Carlson, assistant dean of the Carlson School of Management’s MBA program. Instead, they focus on grade point average, letters of recommendation, a writing sample, work experience, and a GMAT score.

Work experience is the great equalizer among MBA applicants, according to Corey Eakins, director of the University of St. Thomas’s evening MBA program. He says almost everyone in an MBA program starts thinking about getting an MBA because of their job. “After gaining real-world work experience, they figure out that an MBA will fill gaps in their skill set and enable them to move up in their company, make a career shift, or even start their own business,” he says.

“[Students that haven’t studied business before] want to expand their opportunities like everyone else, of course,” says Augsburg’s MBA director, Steven Zitnick. “But some are trying to get into the business side of their major—for example, a music major who wants to learn how to manage and promote artists.”

Matt Nowakowski, director of St. Mary’s University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities–based MBA program, is not surprised by such a high percentage of MBA students without previous business study. His research for an EdD degree focused on MBA students and led him to an interesting discovery. “When Harvard started the first MBA program in 1908, it specifically targeted engineers, doctors, theologians, and other degree-holding professionals who wanted to better understand the world of business,” he says.