Part-Time Graduate School
A variety of part-time options all provide long-term payoff for master’s degree seeking students.
by Marty Levine

Most people who go to school part-time go to school for a reason, particularly at the graduate level,” says Charlie Miersch.

Miersch, an Army veteran, understands the personal commitment required to pursue higher education. He works for the Graduate Management Admissions Council, which promotes access to grad programs, and he was formerly senior associate dean at the University of Rochester’s William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration.

Part-time grad students “want to expand their horizons,” Miersch says. “They want a credential in most cases. It’s a very big personal expense to do this” – nights in class away from family or friends, and other times spent doing homework.

Life-changing experience
But a graduate degree can also be life-changing. Happily, there are more and more part-time options for attending grad school as a way to transform your life for the better.

“Today’s models have changed a lot,” Miersch says about part-time education. Some part-time students go through their courses, or some of their courses, with a set group of fellow students, just like full-time students, and are able to take full advantage of networking opportunities among classmates after graduation. The more traditional part-time schedule – each student working at his own pace – is still widely available too, of course. And online programs can sometimes make for the ultimate part-time experience. They combine every option.

“If you’re making a transition from military post to very similar civilian work – say, from quartermaster to supply-chain manager for a military contractor – then a part-time degree is ideal. On the opposite end of the scale, a dramatic career move may warrant full-time schooling,” Miersch says.

“You need to think about what you want to achieve with your degree,” he explains. “You get an MBA” – or other graduate degrees – “because you want to advance your career or switch your career path. You have to make that decision before you choose part-time or full-time and where you want to go to school.”

A master’s is a credential
“I do think the master’s degree is going to be an increasingly important credential,” says Mike Randerson, vice president for adult higher education at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri. He’s a 25-year Air Force veteran whose military career took him from Vietnam to a position as the dean of students at the Air War College. By his retirement a decade ago, as a colonel, he was commander of the University of Missouri-Columbia Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps.

“A lot of times,” Randerson says, “when military people retire or get out after a few enlistments, they’re eager for promotions, to get into mid- to upper-level management. But they need a master’s degree.”

Columbia offers three graduate options: the Master of Science in Criminal Justice, for those already in, or wishing to go into, law enforcement; the MBA; and the Master of Arts in Teaching, geared toward those already in the teaching field. All take the standard 36 credit hours.

“Our graduate programs are geared toward the working adult,” says Randerson. “We only offer evening programs. Our students average three and a half classes a year,” taken among the school’s five eight-week sessions. Yet each graduate program features a capstone course – a common experience for students to share as a group.

Columbia has hundreds of students in its grad programs, distributed among its home campus and five national campuses on military bases. Thirty percent of students have military backgrounds.

“We really do appreciate our military students,” Randerson says. “They bring a whole lot of experience to the table.” In turn, Columbia helps those with military experience maximize their grad student experience. Columbia’s “Serving the Public Servant Coordinators” are vets who understand how prospective students’ military experience and education transfer best to Columbia credits.

Markets value all grad degrees
“The market seems to value either full-time or part-time pretty well” — and pretty evenly, when you look at graduate programs, says Joseph Stevens, associate director of MBA admissions at Washington University’s John M. Olin School of Business in St. Louis.

Washington’s Professional MBA (PMBA) program is offered in the evenings. The PMBA requires a twice weekly commute and may take three years to complete, but Stevens reports that more than half of the students going through the program since 2003 have graduated in 2.5 years or less.

We offer a lot of weekend options for classes, once they get into the elective phase,” he says. Some students start part-time and turn into full-time students after getting out of the military. “If there’s something they need to do, we’ll work with them,” Stevens says.

Helping student success in the program, he adds, is the fact that all PMBA enrollees who begin in the same semester complete the first four core courses together.

“I went through the exact same program,” he adds. “The biggest benefit for me, besides learning an incredible amount of information, is the relationships you build with your classmates.” All PMBA grads become automatic Olin Veterans Association members, with the benefits of national mentoring and social networking. Plus, of course, the career change and salary jump that goes with it.

Part-timers, Stevens reports, “are posting the same type of statistics our full-time folks do” when it comes to average salaries after graduation. A junior military officer straight out of military might get $50-70,000, he says, whereas “with an MBA you can add $30,000 to 40,000 to that figure.”

What makes an MBA attractive to military personnel is that “they’ve been used to having massive amounts of responsibility. With an MBA they can then go into the civilian world with the same amount of responsibilities” with the increased salary, he concludes. The former military students are “the single most sought-after segment of our class has been that group, no matter how you slice it.”

Online options part of the part-time picture
The online world has long been a part of the part-time grad-school picture. David Binder is online program director for Upper Iowa University, in Fayette, Iowa which offers an MBA and a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree, both online. The MBA allows for emphases in quality management, accounting, organizational development, corporate financial management, human resources management or global business; the MPA’s areas include administration of public organizations, organizational process, public policy, management of funding, budgeting, and staff leadership.

The 150-year-old institution has 240 students between the two programs, and about 20 percent have military backgrounds. It helps that UIU is part of the Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges program, whose 1,200 member institutions have agreed to ease the transfer of college credits among them.

“Our military students tend to be good students, more serious than the average student,” Binder notes. He retired from the Coast Guard in 2005 as a commander with two decades in the Reserve, which followed several years of active duty.

Being online, UIU’s part-time programs give students no formal classmates. In fact, the classes are completely asynchronous, allowing students to work any time of the day or night. But Binder says the university has a number of ways to make the experience a shared one. “There are community news groups — a kind of online student lounge — as well as a chat room for each course. And every course includes one collaborative assignment, using “virtual teaming.” It’s a very valuable skill to practice for students’ future in many types of work environments today.

Operation MBA coming to you
Charlie Miersch’s work with the Graduate Management Admissions Council includes being a consultant for “Operation MBA,” aimed at providing the military and its civilian support personnel with information about the value of this most sought-after master’s degree. They’ve developed the MBA Planner (MBA.com/military) and have visited the 25 largest U.S. military bases, presenting some of the information to military personnel.

“It’s hard to get people to come out” for the presentation, he says, noting that even though military personnel can get reimbursed for taking the MBA qualifying exam — the GMAT — through DANTES, only about 1,000 people took advantage of this benefit last year. There may be a similar hesitation to fully explore other graduate degrees. The best way to know whether part-time grad school is for you, Miersch says, “is to talk to someone who has been through the experience.”