Enrollment in Orange County business programs is up 12% from a year earlier to 6,752 students, according to this week’s Business Journal directory.
The upswing was driven by a 34% yearly increase at for-profit online college TUI University, which saw its master’s of business administration students go from 2,553 to 3,412.
The recession has proven a boon for Cypress-based TUI and other for-profit colleges as laid off workers head back to school to train for new jobs (see story, page 32).
Without TUI, the other schools here saw MBA enrollees decline 3% to 3,340 students.
The local gain outpaced a 3% business school enrollment gain at schools across Southern California, which counted 19,223 students.
The directory includes listings for schools offering MBA programs throughout Southern California. Many of the schools, but not all, have OC campuses.
The goal is to try to measure enrollment at schools in the county as well as at campuses such as the University of Southern California or California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, which draw a lot of students from OC.
The county’s three major schools—the University of California, Irvine, California State University, Fullerton, and Chapman University in Orange—educate about a quarter of all OC business students with 1,558 enrolled.
A downward trend in enrollment played out at UC Irvine.
The UCI Paul Merage School of Business’ MBA program saw its enrollment decline 7.2% to 812 students.
The school expects that drop to be temporary.
“We’ve seen individuals who felt it was very important to get an MBA, but who decided to wait a while until the turmoil settled a little bit,” said Andrew Policano, dean of the Paul Merage School of Business. “We’ve seen an increase of 35% in applications this year.”
This record-high number of applications could turn in to record enrollments for the 2010 to 2011 school year, according to Policano.
Part of what makes OC attractive to prospective students is schools’ connections with local businesses and executives, according to Policano.
UCI placed 92% of its graduating class this year 90 days after the June graduation, he said.
“A lot of other top business schools tend to place in the financial district on Wall Street,” Policano said. “We’re a lot more diverse in the employers and companies we work with.”
Cal State Fullerton grew its MBA enrollees by 9.2% compared to a year earlier to 464 students.
This bump in graduate students is a departure from what OC’s public universities are seeing on the undergraduate level, as state and federal budget cuts are pushing schools to scale back admissions and classes.
“We have reduced our admissions for the undergraduate level, but we’re not cutting back on our graduate level,” said Anil Puri, dean of the Steven G. Mihaylo College of Business and Economics at CSUF.
CSUF’s College of Business and Economics, which has the largest business school in the state, has expanded recently through state bond money and donations from former graduates.
The school has raised more than $50 million in donations in the past few years, which includes $30 million from alumnus Steven G. Mihaylo, founder of Arizona-based Inter-Tel Inc., now part of Canada’s Mitel Network Corp.
The money went toward building the business school and funding professors on the undergraduate and graduate level, according to the school.
Chapman University’s MBA students increased by 11.5% to 282 compared to a year earlier, according to the directory.
Chapman credits its increased enrollment to its rising reputation as a business school and networks it has built with local businesses, according to Kraft.
“This is an extremely competitive market, probably one of the most competitive in the country,” Arthur Kraft, dean of the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman in Orange “Definitely more schools are taking notice.”
As competition gets tougher for MBA programs at the big schools, more students are attracted to online courses.
TUI University, owned by Cypress-based TUI University LLC, competes with other colleges that offer MBA courses online including Illinois-based DeVry University, which has a campus in Irvine, and University of Phoenix, which has campuses in Costa Mesa and Laguna Hills.
TUI has seen increased interest from working professionals unable to get into the state schools that have steepened acceptance requirements, said Tom Finaly, vice president of public administrations.
Since the college offers all of its degree programs online, it is able to keep tuition low because it doesn’t have to deal with the cost of maintaining a campus, he said.
A full-time student’s tuition is about $11,000 in total, while part-time students can pay $295 a credit. The program requires 44 credits to graduate.
In comparison, CSUF’s MBA program, which spans about two years, has a total tuition cost of about $15,000.
An MBA program at University of Southern California or Pepperdine University costs from $70,000 to $80,000.
OC’s overall strong MBA enrollment has piqued the interest of universities outside the county, school officials said.
“We have USC, Pepperdine and others who are successful here,” Chapman’s Kraft said. “In the future, other schools will definitely enter this market place.”
USC saw its local enrollment rise 9% to 410 even though its overall Southern California enrollment declined 3% to 1,642.
Pepperdine University saw OC enrollment fall 6% and its overall enrollment slipped 5%.
