Master of Business Administration

Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a master's degree in business administration, which attracts people from a wide range of academic disciplines.

The MBA designation originated in the United States, emerging as the country industrialized and companies sought out scientific approaches to management. The first American business school, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was established in 1881, 62 years after the world's first business school ESCP-EAP was established in 1819 in Paris. The Tuck School of Business, part of Dartmouth College, was the first graduate school of management in the US. Founded in 1900, it was the first institution conferring advanced degrees (masters) in the commercial sciences, the forebearer of the modern MBA. Founded in 1898, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the second oldest US business school, was the first graduate school in 1940 to offer working professionals the Executive MBA (EMBA) program, a mainstay at most business schools today. Thunderbird School of Global Management, founded in 1946 following World War II by Lieutenant General Barton Kyle Yount, (the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Training Command), is the first and the oldest Business School in the United States focused solely on "International Business".

As the US MBA model emerged at the turn of the 20th century, Europeans developed such business schools as at Webster Graduate School at Regent's College, London and in Manchester Business School; elsewhere colleges such as Cass Business School, London, IMD, MBA-HSG, Instituto de Empresa, INSEAD, Henley Management College, Cranfield School of Management, and Ashridge were established for management training. In 1950 the first MBA degrees were awarded outside the United States by the University of Western Ontario in Canada,[1] followed in 1951 with the degree awarded across the Atlantic by the University of Pretoria in South Africa.[2] In 1964, University College Dublin became the first European university offering the MBA degree, followed in 1969 by the HEC School of Management (in French, the École des Hautes Études Commerciales) and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. In 1968, the Asian Institute of Management was founded.

The MBA degree has been adopted by universities worldwide, and all six inhabitable continents have universities offering MBA programs.

In Europe, the recent Bologna Accord established uniformity in three levels of higher education: Bachelor (3 years), Masters (5 years), and Doctorate (8 years). Students can acquire professional experience after their initial bachelor degree at any European institution and later complete their masters in any other European institution via the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System. A European masters degree in Management is therefore equivalent to the American MBA having additional scientific content; for example, a European master of science in management requires writing and defending a master's thesis.

Opportunity Cost: Online MBA programs do not require student to quite their jobs. Going the traditional MBA route will leave students with out income for 1-2 years
Convenience: Online MBA courses can be taken from the comfort of your home. Save valuable time an money traveling to the business school campus. Online MBAs can be done at good schools. Many reputable institutions, such as Penn State University offer Online MBA Programs.
Money: MBA programs completed over the internet are significantly less expensive than full time, on-campus MBA programs. Figure the cost savings of an online MBA program plus your opportunity cost of losing two years of income.
In sum, Online MBA programs can be a great choice for today’s busy professional.

Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a tertiary degree in business management. Originally designed to provide engineers with management skills, today's MBA draws applicants from a range of disciplines.