Poets&Quants' third annual ranking of the top online MBA programs in the U.S.

For all the hand-wringing over the decline of full-time, two-year MBA programs, the online versions of the most popular credential in business continues to grow. Hardly a month goes by without yet another business school launching an online MBA program.

This fall alone, the University of Michigan, UC-Davis and Southern Methodist University are among the newcomers who have welcomed their first cohorts of students. Many other programs have yet to graduate their first students, including Rice University. In less than four years, the $22,000 iMBA from the University of Illinois Gies School of Business has boosted enrollment to more than 2,500 online students from an initial cohort of just 114 students.

The growth speaks volumes about the continued interest in an MBA and the benefits of doing one online. You can, after all, keep your job and the paychecks that come with it when you do an online MBA. You can more easily fit it into your personal life. And you can immediately apply the benefits of your education at work, making you an immediately more valuable manager or executive.

And while not all of the online options are exactly cheap, there are many more affordable versions of the MBA in the online space than there are in on-campus options. Whats more, you dont have to settle for doing an MBA at a local or regional business school. Since its online, you can get the bigger, national or global brand wherever you are.

So who is doing the best job in delivering an online MBA? At PoetsandQuants.com, we recently published our third annual ranking of the top online MBA programs in the U.S. Proving perhaps that you get what you pay for, the very best online experience is being delivered by Carnegie Mellon Universitys Tepper School of Business which ranked first for the second time in three of our rankings.

The schools part-time hybrid program actually includes more in-person classes than any other online option, with live online sessions, in-person weekends, and traditional online course structures. Thats why it is also the most expensive online program in the world with a $137,200 price tag. In fact, three of the top five online programs are all priced in six figures, including No. 3 University of Southern Californias option at $106,197 and No. 5 University of North Carolinas MBA@UNC which costs $125,589.

Following Tepper in second place on this years list is Indiana Universitys Kelley Direct Online MBA program, which rose up one spot from its third-place finish last year. Kelley consistently finds itself at the top of numerous rankings and this is the second time the schools KelleyDirect program has ranked in second place. With a price tag of $74,520, the Kelley program seems like a bargain, particularly for a business school whose full-time MBA program is consistently among the top 20 in the U.S.

But then there is Lehigh Universitys College of Business online MBA which captured fourth place and is the most affordable of the top five this year at just $39,600. In all, 35 of the best programs were ranked and several of them came in with price tags even below Lehighs highly reasonable cost.

More importantthan the actual ranking, however, is the trove of data collected to compile the ranking. Two-thirds of recent graduates at Louisiana State University say they received a promotion directly because of their online MBA more than any other school. At Carnegie Mellon, nearly nine out of ten (88%) say they received a salary increase after completing the program, again, topping every other school in the ranking (seeBest Career Outcomes For Online MBAs).

When alumni were asked to appraise the overall quality of their professors, no other school scored better than the Jack Welch Management Institute, which notched a score of 9.78 out of a possible 10 points (seeOnline MBA Programs With The Best Student Satisfaction Scores). That outcome will come as a surprise to many academics but the former CEO of General Electric has made student evaluations of faculty a key driver of who gets to teach in the Institutes program. Online MBA alumni from the Rochester Institute of Technology scored their school best on the amount and quality of teamwork available in the program, with an average of 9.63.

Asked about their satisfaction in immediately applying classroom learning to their jobs, both RIT Saunders and the Jack Welch Management Institute scored a highly impressive 9.75 on the ten-point scale. As for a programs flexibility to allow students to manage their professional and personal lives while earning an MBA, alumni from the University of Cincinnati rated their school best with a score of 9.88.

When it came to admissions acceptance rates, the toughest school for the 2018-2019 academic year was RIT Saunders, which accepted just 30.8% of its applicants (seeAcceptance Rates At The Best Online MBA Programs). Next was the Jack Welch Management Institute, which accepted 1,253 applicants from a pool of 3,103 for an acceptance rate of 40.4%. With an average of 700 students, professionals enrolling at the University of North Carolinas Kenan-Flagler Business School reported the highest GMAT score, even though a mere 6% of UNCs students submitted a GMAT, down from 11% a year earlier. Carnegie Mellons Tepper School had the next highest class GMAT average at 660, with more than 80% of the students submitting a test score.

Bottom line: If you have ever considered getting an online MBA, now is a good time to do so. Many of these programs are offering scholarships to accepted students, and many students are able to get some form of financial assistance from their employers. At the University of Illinois, for example, roughly half the students are getting some money from their companies to offset the tuition bills.

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The Top Online MBAs: The Best Options Now On The Market - Forbes