How you’ll earn an MBA degree in the future

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In a quarter of a century, most business students will never enter a classroom. The faculty lectures, the MBA student discussions and the homework assignments will occur instead over the Internet, where each part of the educational experience can be played as many times as it takes to fully absorb or satisfy, as if it were a Seinfeld rerun.

The world’s most famous professors will more likely be compelling teachers—rather than journal-published researchers—and many of them will be free agents, unattached to a single university. Technology will allow for free-agent faculty, able to teach directly to students, with the university being what it will increasingly be viewed as: just another middleman taking a profit. Professors won’t need an affiliation with a university, because technology will allow them to create their own brands.

The costs of academic learning will plummet. And much of education will be modular in nature. Students will pick and choose from the best professors and the best colleges and universities worldwide to construct a degree of choice. There will be little need to go to one school for several years and sit in classrooms with other students. The greatest asset universities now hold—the ability to grant a degree—will have so greatly diminished in value that it will become little more than a quant notion for the learned.

A doomsday scenario?

A doomsday scenario for business education? Not really. The nominal purpose of a business school is for academic learning. But as learning becomes increasingly available online, it’s likely that the other functions of a traditional on-campus experience—student selection, extracurricular leadership and social development, career management and alumni networking—also will become unbundled. Most business schools inevitably would lose their allure.

We’re already witnessing the very beginning of what will be revolutionary change to the most popular credential in all of business: the MBA degree. As far back as 1975, the MBA blew past both law and medical degrees in the U.S. But it was only three years ago, in 2010–2011, that business edged out education as the most popular advanced degree, accounting for 25.6 percent of all master’s degrees. The numbers for business are largely made up of MBAs but also include specialized business master’s programs, including master’s of finance or accounting.