Every year, the U.S. News & World Report ranks college programs nationally and by state. This year, Oswego State’s Online MBA program had the honor of being ranked 27th nationally and first in the state.
“It’s great, when you take a look at a mid-sized public institution, to be ranked nationally at 27th by US News & Reports, we’re very proud of it,” Dean of Business Richard Skolnik said.
Oswego State beat out programs such as Rochester Institute of Technology, Clarkson, Syracuse and Marist University. It is the only public school in New York State to be on the list.
Recent graduate Floyd Backes completed the course through a mix of online courses, classes on the main campus of Oswego State and the Metro Center in downtown Syracuse.
“I found the strategy, management and decision making courses to be the most useful in my professional life,” Backes said. “These courses gave me new perspectives and tools, from both the curriculum and fellow students, to improve my ability to make well informed decisions.”
Online programs offer a new way to further education for non-traditional students. Most students in the MBA program came from different colleges and had already moved on with their careers.
Oswego State has a long history of excellence in the MBA program, both online and in the classroom. It has been offered since 1997 and was the first SUNY school to do so.
The U.S. News & World Report ranked it in 2014 and 2016, and the Princeton Review named it a Best College in the Northeast in 2014. The School of Business is AACB International the Association to Advance Collegiate School of Business, accredited.
Oswego State was one of the first schools in the Open SUNY Initiative.
“We applied and five schools and seven programs, were accepted for this first way of Open SUNY,” Skolnik said. “We were one. We actually had two programs – it was the online MBA and the online MBA in health service administration.”
Open SUNY is a program that allows students to get a world-class online education.
“The campus has been a leader in online from early on,” Skolnik said. “So, SUNY Oswego had made a commitment early on, as a college, to online education. We started offering MBA classes online – a course here, a course there, whenever teachers were interested.”
This snowballed into more and more online classes.
“That made it very convenient, especially for working professionals,” Skolnik said.
The online MBA program serves a large working class. It has helped 20 percent earn a promotion once they graduated and helped 32 percent of the students earn a promotion while in the program. About 14 percent of students left their current employer for a better job either during the program or upon graduation. Backes was one of those students.
“I made my latest move during the MBA program from the director of operations for Davis-Standard, to my current role as VP global operations for PPC,” Backes said.
Oswego State earned the ranking for a variety of reasons, including the training faculty has received, how it is reviewed by its peers, student services and technology and how selective the admissions process is.
One of the biggest advantages of the online program is the 24/7 concierge, Skolnik said. It allows students to go to one person for all their needs, instead of getting passed around by various offices.
