The MBA, rebooted

Studying for an MBA used to be so predictable. You would spend countless hours in classrooms, listening to lecturers drone on about management, balance sheets and marketing. Then there would be more time, often over coffee, wine and cold pizza, in cramped meeting rooms, collaborating and arguing with fellow students over shared projects.

There was a good chance that pre-existing personal relationships would strain and even snap as studies progressed. Not for nothing was the MBA — and its sibling, the master’s in business leadership (MBL) — known as the “marriage-breaker”. How could an everyday, domestic partner (and children) hope to compete with the physical intimacy and intellectual stimulation of a tightly knit group?

Finally, after years of study and exhaustion as well as the struggles of a thesis, would come graduation and the belief (not always warranted) that your MBA degree assured you of a bright future.

How things have changed. In 2026, there’s a good chance you could gain your degree without ever setting foot in a classroom, meeting a lecturer in person or interacting with a fellow student. You need never put your marriage or partnership to the test.

This isn’t all that’s changed. For years, local MBAs have been firmly generalist, meaning they teach the broad principles of management and business administration. Armed with the degree, you theoretically possess the skills to cope in any industry. Some MBAs include an emphasis on particular sectors, but the Council on Higher Education (CHE), which oversees standards and curricula at universities and business schools, has insisted that most teaching be applicable to all sectors.

Now, even that has changed. Wits Business School (WBS) interim director Logan Rangasamy says the CHE has allowed the school to offer a health-care-specific MBA. “We argued that the health-care sector is different and requires its own management and leadership skills,” he says.

It wasn’t an easy sell: “It took us three years to convince the council and go through the accreditation process.”

Other schools appear to be in no rush to follow suit. Health-care-biased (but not exclusive) MBAs are offered at several schools, along with others aimed at entrepreneurship, digital transformation, consulting, supply chain management, project management, climate leadership and manufacturing.

Morris Mthombeni, dean of the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs), which includes entrepreneurship and manufacturing among its specialities, says: “We are unlikely to register an MBA with a specific theme. We think it loses its currency. We want our qualifications to speak to everyone … to offer career flexibility.”

South African Business Schools Association chair Cobus Oosthuizen says: “The MBA should remain a general management qualification — not become a collection of fashionable subjects. Students need to learn how multiple parts of multiple organisations fit together.”

He adds: “We want to develop responsible, adaptable leaders with sound judgment in difficult circumstances, whatever the sector.”

An MBA should offer much more than management skills, says Johannesburg Business School (JBS) dean Alistair Mokoena. “It provides you with the opportunity for personal transformation,” he says. “It can change who you are.”

Students enter as plain careerists and leave as responsible, transformative and caring leaders, with an understanding of issues far beyond the workplace, he says.

According to Stellenbosch Business School senior director Chris van der Hoven, it doesn’t have to be either-or between generalist and specialist MBAs. “The real trend is specialisation layered on top of a generalist core,” he says. “Elite generalist programmes still win on optionality for candidates who want career flexibility; specialist programmes win on depth for candidates with real conviction about their path.”

He says it’s a “trade-off”, while acknowledging that Stellenbosch won’t rule out eventually turning its own health-care-centric generalist MBA into a specialist one. “It’s an important subject worldwide, not just in South Africa,” he says. The UK and US are among markets where health-care systems are under severe strain.

A wealth of options

Shared MBAs are also coming into fashion. WBS has introduced a joint executive MBA with France’s Kedge business school (a grande école — a specialised elite, top-level educational institution in France) that requires students to study in both France and South Africa. Gibs is among other schools developing programmes that enable overseas study.

Van der Hoven says Stellenbosch University, of which his business school is part, is exploring opportunities for joint degrees. Among overseas academics being consulted is former Wits University vice-chancellor Adam Habib, now vice-chancellor at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies in the UK.

“We are very interested in a joint degree, but it is tricky,” says Van der Hoven. “Given the weakness of the rand, how do you manage the exchange-rate differential? How do you get cost parity between the partners? There is no precedent within Stellenbosch University.”

Joint degrees go beyond the international study tours that are an integral (and sometimes compulsory) part of MBA programmes. Tours allow students to engage with people in business centres around the world. Shared MBAs encourage a deeper experience through extended study in, and experience of, other countries.

Such MBAs encourage something that has been going out of fashion: personal interaction between students and lecturers. Distance MBAs, some with limited interaction and some with none, are becoming the norm.

As the accompanying tables show, almost 3,000 of the 7,245 students at various stages of MBAs at business schools participating in our market research are distance learners. Everything is online. Some lectures are live; some are pre-recorded. Some enable students to meet virtually; others impose solitary study.

There has been some retreat from this trend in the past three or four years, with a shift to hybrid learning — a mixture of online and in-person tuition. However, traditional full-time and part-time programmes requiring daily or evening/weekend classroom sessions haven’t recovered.

Van der Hoven says: “Candidates need to keep working and earning while they study, so modular block-release and blended formats, on-campus intensives plus evening or online delivery are what’s actually growing, not complete withdrawal from the workforce.”

That’s why full-time programmes have gone out of fashion in South Africa. Only two schools — Gibs and the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business — still offer them. Together, they enrolled 55 full-time students this year, from 225 who applied. That is a tiny percentage of the total 9,400 applications for all MBAs at participating schools, the 4,917 who were accepted and the 2,845 who actually enrolled.

It’s worth noting that the 9,400 includes applications to multiple schools by some students. Nevertheless, the gap between applications, offers and enrolments underlines the difference between hope and reality.

Thousands of applicants lack the academic qualifications to undertake an MBA. In principle, schools demand a business-related honour’s degree or equivalent, such as a postgraduate diploma. Alternatively, schools may apply recognition of prior learning, through which candidates’ business experience is deemed to compensate for lack of academic credentials.

Some schools expect students to have several years’ work or management experience. Then there may be written essays, interviews and even psychometric testing to negotiate.

Even when accepted for study, many candidates drop out because they can’t afford the cost. Scholarships and bursaries are available but highly competitive. With fees ranging from R114,000 to well over R500,000, this is not a degree to be undertaken lightly.

Oosthuizen is also dean of postgraduate studies at Boston City Campus, which welcomed its first MBA students this year. It accepted 56 but only 23 enrolled. “More would have been nice, but the actual number is a reflection of the current economic climate,” he says.

Pricing aside, there is a view that some entry barriers are too onerous. The demand for management experience, for example, results in the typical age of South African MBA students being higher than in other countries. Instead of preparing for careers, they are already embedded in them.

Mthombeni believes lowering the average age of full-time students from the mid-30s to the mid- to late-20s would free more to apply. “We want to give our full-time offerings a lot more runway,” he says.

Van der Hoven says the age challenge extends beyond full-time MBAs. The average age of students at Stellenbosch, which has no full-time programme, is 38. That has repercussions for local schools undertaking joint degrees with overseas institutions, where students are much younger. “How do you create a common programme for people of different generations and at different stages of their careers?”

Picking the right programme

All these issues are part of the process of carving out market niches in a competitive market. South African business schools offer a wide variety of MBA study options. So do foreign schools entering the market, particularly through online programmes.

Students may find it difficult to determine which programme best suits their needs. It’s not just about the study format and price, but also what students want from their career. Do they want a programme geared primarily for the South African market, one for middle or senior management, for the private sector, for the government, or one that will give them international mobility?

The number of local schools pursuing international accreditation for their programmes is growing. Almost half are accredited by the London-based Association of MBAs (Amba). Others hoping to join them must be patient. To maintain exclusivity, Amba has capped accreditation at 200 schools. One must drop out for another to take its place.

Instead, hopefuls can be accredited to Amba’s Business Graduates Association (BGA), which doesn’t measure MBA standards but schools’ social and student impact, responsible management and lifelong learning opportunities.

JBS is among those pursuing BGA approval — a step Mokoena hopes may eventually lead to full Amba accreditation. The school has also applied for the blessing of the Association of African Business Schools, which is trying to uplift continental standards.

However, Mokoena says the school is not getting ahead of itself. Part of the University of Johannesburg, it is less than a decade old and still considers itself a “challenger” school. It is one of very few with no business doctoral programme — a qualification Mokoena says “would eventually make sense as an evolution” — and originally made its name with an entrepreneurship-based MBA for small, predominantly black start-ups.

The university had planned to site its business school in Soweto before cost implications intervened. “We were the first business school to focus on small business entrepreneurship,” says Mokoena, who was appointed dean last September.

“We offer a link between digital and society and SMEs. We try to fuse them together. We want to be seen as an African, ethical, business-centred school. We want people with integrity, and to make a difference in societal impact.”

And so say all the schools.