Overview
Business schools today are able to differentiate themselves by offering prospective students a wide range of curriculum and program options. In this study, the similarities and differences in curricula for full-time, parttime, and executive programs are compared for a stratified random sample of 150 schools. One would expect that since the goal of each program type is the same, acquiring the skills to have a successful career in management, differentiation among programs would be minimal. In this analysis, discriminant analysis was used to determine if program type could be identified based on required courses. The program type is used as the criterion variable, and courses are used as the predictor variables. Course data was partitioned into meaningful subgroups based on shared subject matter to identify the subjects that could discriminate between program types. Frequency distributions for all course data were also computed and stratified by program type. Results revealed that there are significant differences in the required courses of executive MBA programs compared to full-time and part-time programs.