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Too Old for Business School?
Full-time MBAs 40 and older are rare. But for some, it's a valuable experience
By Alysa Teichman | BusinessWeek
Full-time MBAs 40 and older are rare. But for some, it’s a valuable experience
On several field trips to local businesses, 42-year-old Liza Turley, a 2008 graduate of the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, noticed a recurring misunderstanding. Speakers and business leaders would often assume she was a teacher, not a student.
Considering Turley had a good decade on her classmates, it wasn’t surprising that onlookers didn’t peg her as a student. After all, of all full-time MBA students, 40-and-older students remain a rare subset. And while the MBA is, for the most part, a younger person’s game, many older students are finding ways to make it work.
Typically, business students enter graduate school with about five years of post-undergraduate work experience, meaning they are generally in their late 20s or early 30s, a time of life when new directions are being set. In contrast, adults 40 and older are often settled in careers, have families, and are at a level where the additional skills don’t guarantee substantial payback. For that reason, they are more likely to get their business degrees in executive or part-time programs.
“Usually by your late 20s, you’re at a pivotal point in your career where you’re making decisions about the rest of your future,” says Rachel Edgington, director of market research and analysis at the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).
But for some people, the move is right regardless of age. “There’s never a bad time to pursue a graduate degree. A graduate degree of business has been proven to increase career options,” Edgington says.
For Turley, an MBA helped her acquire the skills and vocabulary to move from a small entrepreneurial environment to a larger corporate one. For 12 years she was in the food business and had a large share in a catering business for seven of those years. “I had similar goals as my peers, but I just had a much deeper work history,” Turley says.
Regardless of her age, Turley, who got her current job at Akona Consulting in Kirkland, Wash., through a classmate a year older, said that her MBA degree was worth it “unequivocally.”
While the number of 40-and-older students in all graduate programs increased from 1995 to 2005, according to the Council of Graduate Schools, the GMAC reports that the number of GMAT business entrance exams taken by 40- to 49-year-old students has been decreasing over the past several years.
Of 217,698 GMAT tests taken in the 2006-07 testing year, only 7,581, or less than 4%, were taken by 40- to 49-year-olds. That’s also about a third less than five years earlier, when the 40-to-49 group took 10,092 tests. Edgington attributes this drop to several factors, including the fact that Generation X is one of the smallest population bubbles.
Still, although the number of tests taken by the 40-and-older crowd is down, admissions experts point out that an MBA remains a viable option for the right student.
One academic who advocates 40-year-olds going to school is Michael Williams, the recently appointed dean of Touro College of Business in New York City. Touro has a high number of adult students—almost 20% of the fulltime graduating class there is 40 and older. Williams estimates the average student in this year’s graduating class is in his or her early 30s.
“I can’t imagine not going for an MBA when you’re older—that’s my professional and personal belief,” Williams says. “We typically find that our older students come to us clearly with a plethora of experience. Some of it is fragmented, [and] they don’t know how it fits together.”
Anita Brick, director of career advancement programs at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where there are typically just a few 40-and-over full-time students but none in the 2008 class, agreed that many older students who find success in their MBAs use what they already know.
