Dear Faculty and Staff,
The US News Online MBA rankings were released today. This is an important ranking for us since our Online MBA program, with 200 students, has the highest enrollment among our Paul College graduate programs.
Unfortunately, we dropped from #40, where we have held steady the past two years, to #56. Our overall score remained the same, but others moved ahead of us. This likely reflects the extensive investment universities have made on online education during COVID, and/or subtle changes in the ranking formulas.
Nonetheless, #56 is a solid ranking and we are going to celebrate and promote it. We remain in the top five of ranked OL MBA programs in New England and the only top ranked program in NH. At #56 out of 361 schools we are in the top 15% of OL MBA programs nationally. While we have slipped, we are still coming in ahead of a good number of our regional competitors Bentley (#62), Quinnipiac (#84), UMaine (#84), Bryant (#96), Northeastern (#96), UMASS – Boston (#113), WPI (#175), and Suffolk (#190).
Of concern for us in the marketplace is that UMASS-Lowell moved up to #31 and has a lower tuition and UMass-Amherst, an aspirational school and major competitor, is #12 and has the same out-of-state tuition that we do. We will be reviewing the rankings carefully and will develop a strategy to climb back up into the top 50 in the next 1-2 years.
A strong point in our rankings is the quality of our faculty and we want to thank all of the faculty who are teaching so effectively in this program. We also want to thank the great team in the Graduate Programs Office who drive admissions and support the program and our students as well as our Marketing and Communications team for their focused work on marketing our graduate programs with quite constrained resources.
Reviewing all US News rankings for graduate programs (OL and F2F) at UNH, this OL MBA ranking is the 2nd highest program ranking behind Occupational Therapy (#36). The Law School also has 2 specialization rankings that are high – IP (#4) and Legal Writing (#61). Nursing is also at #63.
Help us amplify this good news. We posted a press release on UNH Today which you can link to and share. We are also doing social media and I would appreciate any amplification you can do by liking and sharing our posts. I have posted already and UNH Paul College just posted. We will use the hashtags #paulpride, #onlineMBA, #Bestonlineprograms.
Onward,
Deborah and Vicky
Deborah Merrill-Sands, Ph.D.
Dean
Paul College of Business and Economics
University of New Hampshire
