The Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech might rival MIT Sloan and Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business with respect to its focus on the direct application of Internet technology to global business problems. The school’s rather small (approximately 60–80 students each year) and innovation-focused program was nevertheless ranked 29th among full-time MBA programs in the United States by Bloomberg Businessweek in 2021.
Situated in the heart of Technology Square in Midtown Atlanta, Scheller offers students numerous networking and innovation resources within the city’s high-tech business community, including the Advanced Technology Development Center business incubator. In addition, the Enterprise Innovation Institute, or EI2, bills itself as “the nation’s largest and most comprehensive university-based program of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization, and economic development” on its website and provides students with resources for career options at the intersection of business and technology. As an indicator of the school’s overall strengths in information technology and operations management, manufacturing/engineering was the most common pre-MBA industry among the Class of 2023.
Meanwhile, at the Texas A&M University Mays Business School, students follow a full-time, 49-credit MBA curriculum that can be completed in just 16 months (over an 18-month period of August to December) or customized for an extended period of time. Although the core curriculum is very rigid, with foundational management courses spanning the entirety of the program, Mays also offers the option of pursuing certificates and career specializations beyond the 16-month core.
What really stands out about the Mays program, however, is its dedication to maintaining a strong sense of community. Similar to Scheller, the relatively small class size—the 2020 incoming class, for example, featured 86 students—facilitates an intimate classroom setting and personalized attention from faculty and staff at Mays.
