London Business School, Eyeing New Markets, Launches 1-Year MBA Program

London Business School has launched an 11-month MBA program for master’s in management grads. LBS photo

London Business School is making a lot of news lately. A week after it hired a new dean, the renowned Russian economist Sergei Guriev, LBS has announced the launch of a major new program: a one-year MBA, which will get underway in August 2025.

The new program, which will actually take 11 months to complete, will be for recent graduates of accredited master’s in management programs. The school says it expects the program’s tuition fees to be in the £75,000 range (about $95,000), and that applications will open in July 2024.

The move is LBS’s response to a growing market: management master’s graduates who want to join a one-year MBA program that builds on their MiM experience.

NEW PROGRAM IS ‘COMPLEMENTARY TO’ LBS’s 2-YEAR MBA

The popularity of the one-year MBA program officially eclipsed that of its two-year cousin for the first time in 2023, according to research from the Graduate Management Admission Council. In GMAC’s annual Prospective Students Survey released last spring, 22% of would-be students seeking a graduate management education said they would prefer the more accelerated MBA program that costs less and involves half the time away from a paycheck.

This can hardly have been news to business schools themselves; in the U.S., eight of the top 25 B-schools offer one-year MBA programs; altogether in P&Q‘s ranking, 20 schools have one-year MBAs. Some schools like Penn State Smeal College of Business offer only a one-year MBA (a move the school made in 2022). Likewise, the rest of the world is catching on: Asia School of Business in Malaysia, which operates an MBA program in conjunction with MIT Sloan School of Management, last year reduced the length of its program to one year from two – without, it’s worth adding, compromising key program elements like a three-week immersion in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In Europe, birthplace of the one-year-long management master’s, more accelerated MBA options have long been popular. Which is why it makes sense that LBS would tie its new accelerated offering (the school also offers 15- and 18-month MBAs) to its master’s in management program, currently ranked third in the world by The Financial Times. It’s a move, a spokesman tells Poets&Quants, that is an innovative response to “shifting trends in the graduate education market” — not a reflection on the popularity of LBS’s full-time, two-year MBA, which remains strong.

‘BECOMING AN IMPACTFUL LEADER & ACTIVATING AN ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET’

The new degree, says Graham Hastie, associate dean for degree education at LBS, “is an exciting way to meet the demand from top-quality master’s in management graduates for a one-year program, in a way that is complementary to our flagship two-year MBA and that maintains the world-class LBS learning experience. We are particularly excited about the opportunities the innovative core courses will give students to apply their learning to contemporary business issues.”

Those 10 core courses, the school says, will address such issues as the impact of geo-political developments on business, how companies approach investment, and shifts in consumer demands in a changing world. They will also include a strong focus on individual agency and entrepreneurship​ – how, in the school’s description, to solve “complex and unstructured problems, becoming an impactful leader and activating an entrepreneurial mindset.” The new one-year MBA at LBS also features more than 80 electives and a week-long experiential Global Experience course.

“One-year MBA students,” the school says in a news release, “will be expected to follow a pre-program to ensure they have covered all the relevant core concepts. They will then complete a set of short core courses, giving them an exciting opportunity to further refresh their learning of core topics, while also applying them to important, contemporary business issues.”

Read more about LBS’s new one-year MBA here.

DON’T MISS AMONG WOULD-BE STUDENTS, ONE-YEAR MBA OPTIONS OVERTAKE TWO-YEAR MBAs IN POPULARITY and LONDON BUSINESS SCHOOL’S NEW DEAN WAS ONCE FORCED TO FLEE VLADIMIR PUTIN’S RUSSIA

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