The first executive MBA degrees from the B.I. Moody III College of Business Administration will be conferred during Fall 2013 commencement ceremonies on Friday.
All graduates are required to attend the General Assembly at 11 a.m. on Friday at the Cajundome and participate in full regalia. Only doctoral degrees will be conferred during the General Assembly ceremony, however.
Master’s and bachelor’s degrees will be conferred at ceremonies for each academic college, which will also be held on Friday.
Nine graduating seniors will earn executive MBA degrees during the B.I. Moody III College of Business Administration’s ceremony. That ceremony will take place at 1:30 p.m. at the Cajundome.
Executive MBA degrees will be awarded to: Justin R. Carville, Elysha B. Hebert, Edmund W. Hoelker, Brian Jenkins, Andrew D. Shenkan, Samuel D.J. Viator, Jacob J. Yentzen, David A. Young, and Florence M. Ziegler will receive their diplomas during Fall 2013 Commencement ceremonies.
The executive MBA program is similar to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s traditional MBA program, but is geared toward senior managers and executives.
“The application process is exclusive to candidates who are already engaged in successful careers,” said Dr. Joby John, dean of the B.I. Moody III College of Business Administration.
Participants must have worked in a managerial role for at least five years to enroll in the executive MBA program.
Another distinction is that the program has an accelerated pace. Participants, who are referred to as cohorts because they work together in a small, collaborative group setting, complete the program in about 16 months.
They take courses every other weekend on a schedule that includes four hours on Fridays and nine hours on Saturdays.
The curriculum is designed to provide comprehensive instruction in business knowledge, skills, theories and practices.
Courses include: managerial economics; analytical methods for planning and control; advanced financial management and policy; data analysis; management of information technology; operations and project management; marketing management; organizational behavior and leadership; business law, contracts and negotiations; international business; and, policy formulation, strategy and administration.
The UL Lafayette executive MBA program is more affordable than the national average, John said. Cost of the program is about $33,000, which covers tuition, fees, books and software.
Nationwide, the average program cost is $73,401, according to the Executive MBA Council, a non-profit educational association based in Orange, Calif.
Members of the Executive MBA Council include more than 300 executive MBA programs at 200 colleges and universities worldwide. Those programs include: Carnegie Mellon, Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale The University of Oxford in England.
Salary and bonus packages of recent executive MBA program graduates increased by 17.3 percent nationwide from program start to program end, according to the Council’s 2012 Student Exit Benchmarking Survey.
The survey included 3,072 students from 98 executive MBA programs.
Its findings show that the average salary and bonus package for participants when they started their programs was $140,587. By completion, the average salary and bonus had risen to $164,845.