The Specialized MBA

The trend toward specialization has crept into most fields over the past few decades, but few have embraced the shift more enthusiastically than graduate schools of business. Since 1990, the year that the AACBE, the main accreditation board for business schools, changed its guidelines to encourage innovative curriculums, schools have focused on areas like aerospace, wine management, luxury goods, real estate and energy management. 

The percentage of business school students enrolled in specialized programs has risen about 4 percent each year since 2001, according to Erwin J. Berube, the organization’s director for knowledge services. More than a fifth of business school students are now seeking such degrees. 

Instead of exposing students to theory or the big picture of their discipline, specialized programs tend to zero in on practical and commercial applications. It’s an approach more likely to be seen outside the top tier of M.B.A. programs. Institutions like the University of Chicago and Columbia, whose graduates are much sought-after, have mostly kept the general M.B.A., with broad areas of concentration like finance and marketing. But for many others, specialization is a way to stand out among the more than 500 accredited programs here and abroad.

The university is widely considered the pioneer in niche M.B.A. programs, having established some of the first specialized institutes within its business school in the 1990s. The university did away entirely with the general M.B.A. in 2004, opting instead for 13 specializations, including market research and real estate. Niche M.B.A. programs tend to attract students who know exactly to which industry they are heading, as well as older students with business experience who may want to change fields. 

Some niche programs, such as the energy concentration at the University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business, capitalize on geography. Located smack in the middle of oil country, the program has a pool of local employers likely to seek custom-trained executives. With major pharmaceutical firms like Merck and Johnson & Johnson headquartered in the state, Rutgers University in New Jersey offers an M.B.A. in pharmaceutical management. 

European business schools were early adopters of the specialization model, especially in France. The international luxury brand management program at Essec Business School near Paris is conducted entirely in English and attracts about 40 students a year, most of them not French. Students in the wine and spirits M.B.A. program at the Bordeaux Management School in western France enrich their studies with stints at cooperating universities in Australia and northern California.

Investing as much as $30,000 in such a narrowly focused degree may be risky — especially if the market for a particular job dries up suddenly (the tightening of the real estate industry is a good example) — but going deep instead of wide seems to fit right in with an increasingly segmented world. 

Students of AACBE accredited schools should know what they want and they want to be. They should not be wasting time relearning things they already know. They should invest every minute to be something valuable and new.