Mid-Career Education Programs Attract Big-Wigs, Bring in Big Bucks

On the Boston end of the Weeks Footbridge, a red-brick monument to the future of graduate education at Harvard sits swathed in scaffolding.

When it opens next year, the Harvard Business School's (HBS) Executive Education Housing Facility will be 96,000 square feet of living space for "mid-career" students--middle-aged, successful college graduates looking to be rejuvenated and reeducated before heading back into the real world.

HBS's executive education programs are the best-known and most expensive--including $40,500 for one ten-week course--of these programs at Harvard. But nearly every graduate school is expanding their own mid-career offerings this year, targeting audiences from school principals at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) to military leaders at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG).

In fact, President Neil L. Rudenstine says the expansion of mid-career programs is at the top of his list of priorities for the coming year.

Harvard loves mid-career students because their hands-on experience gives graduate school professors a chance to do research without leaving the classroom. And it does not hurt that mid-career programs bring in bales of money--the top three programs took in over $75 million in tuition last year alone. In some cases, these programs pay for themselves, with funding dollars left over.

Mid-career students and their employers love Harvard simply because it is Harvard: providing a good educational experience and a "Veritas"-stamped certificate that, while academically worthless, is resume gold worldwide.

But there is trouble embedded in this back-to-school trend: growing mid-career programs have to take their faculty, funding and space from somewhere. So far there has been a reduction in master's candidates in one school and a freeze in master's students at another--even while new professors were joining that school's staff.

No one is panicking yet, but as mid-career programs increase, soon graduate schools will soon face a tough choice between tradition and high-paying trend.

"Product" and Payment

HBS Senior Associate Dean for Executive Education W. Earl Sasser refers to the education and skills HBS faculty give their corporate students as "product." That corporate buzzword is typical of a setup that looks more like a cross between a consulting firm and a summer camp than a traditional university.

Executive education courses are intensive--students spend an average of four hours in the classroom and perhaps eight more doing homework and reading every day. Classes are taught by HBS faculty.

Customized classes area also set up for the executives of a particular company--the World Bank and Daimler-Benz are past clients. Tuition runs from $2,750 for one three-day program to $40,500 for the "Advanced Management program," all paid by the student's company. HBS takes in over $50 million in tuition annually.

And HBS executive education students get what they pay for. The new housing center will look more like a hotel on the inside than a dormitory, and many classes spend time in Singapore, Europe or Washington as part of their training.

The KSG runs its own mid-career education programs, focusing heavily on officials from developing countries, in addition to non-profit bureaucrats and American politicians. Its courses cost between $2,750 and $11,100 and have names like "Leadership for the 21st Century" and "Infrastructure in a Market Economy."

The School of Public Health (SPH) offers short seminars for physicians and healthcare executives, and its neighbor the Medical School gives "continuing education" classes updating physicians on new techniques and technologies. The cost of SPH classes hovers around $1,000, and Medical School courses run about $250 on average.

Most other graduate schools offer their own, scaled-down versions of executive education, not all of which are as profitable as the HBS, KSG and SPH.

All follow roughly the same pattern, offering Harvard faculty instruction and lots of contact with other professionals in the field. However, HBS's creature comforts are far and away the best. Most other schools send their mid-career students to hotels.

The reasons for growth

Mid-career programs are already growing and new courses are planned in several schools this year. The first reason for this expansion is a simple increase in demand, much of it from overseas.

Rudenstine says he was inspired to call for increases in mid-career programs by a summer visit to Asia.

"There's a real global need. Very few universities have anything like the breadth, depth and span of professional schools that wen do," Rudenstine says. "There's a crying need for it."

Now, "there's hardly a school that doesn't have an international agenda," he says.

And this demand for mid-career education has to be done in short seminars because Harvard seeks to put its stamp on the real powerbrokers in business and government--many of whom simply cannot spare the two or three years to earn a Harvard MBA or Master of Public Policy degree.

Harvard officials say they are happy to accommodate this demand as far as funding and faculty schedules will allow. They say professors love to teach mid-career classes because their research comes to them in the form of students who are also experienced professionals.

"Imagine you're a young faculty member. You walk in to a room and everybody is older and more experienced than you, and your job is to help them learn from one another," says Peter B. Zimmerman, associate dean for executive education at the KSG.

"It's an enormous opportunity for faculty to gain insight into how the world works," Zimmerman said.

And officials say many mid-career students are happy to provide their money and experience in exchange for a chance to interact with each other and to take home a Harvard "degree" of sorts--in reality a certificate of attendance.

"I've served on panels with some very distinguished people," said David A. Shore, assistant dean of continuing professional education at SPH. "And when they read their biographies, it will say, master's degree, Ph.D. and a one-week [program] at Harvard."

Shore and others say an added benefit for Harvard is that the alumni of these programs create a network of connections in the professional world, which feeds back to Harvard in terms of prestige and dollars.

"It's a vehicle to bring back alumni and create opportunities for research, and opportunities to place our students within these organizations," Shore said.

The problems

HBS and KSG, two of the schools most aggressively expanding their mid-career programs, were the first two to feel the squeeze put on their traditional master's and Ph.D. students.

The KSG cut back the number of Masters of Public Policy (MPP) students this year from 850 to around 750. Officials say this cut was only slightly related to expansion in executive education, but also have no plans to increase MPP enrollment, even as they add faculty.

The same process has already taken place at HBS, where MBA enrollment has held steady while 40 new faculty members were added over the last three years. At both KSG and HBS, the extra faculty were added to free up professors for mid-career teaching.

At a number of other schools, faculty teach mid-career courses in the summer or on days off. But as the number of mid-career courses increase, faculty vacation time will run out and the University will hit the bottom of its piggy bank for faculty hires.

Rudenstine says graduate schools will soon have to choose between their bread and butter students and a new gig that looks more like consulting than teaching.

"I don't know if anybody will cut back their first-degree programs," Rudenstine said. "But every one of them will have to think out this problem."