Thirty-three students from around the world gathered in Frankfurt, Germany Tuesday to begin their first term as the pioneer class of the Duke Goethe Executive MBA program. The 22-month, dual-degree program is a collaborative effort between the Fuqua School of Business and Frankfurt University’s Johann Wolfgang Goethe Business School. The degree allows students to simultaneously pursue their MBA degrees and professional careers.
“Academic concepts and performance tools from the program can be immediately applied in the workplace,” Goethe Dean Mark Wahrenberg said in a statement. “The employee’s value to his or her organization increases over the individual’s time in the program.”
Students enrolled in the program must complete 18 business courses distributed over eight academic terms. Two-thirds of the classes are taught by Duke faculty; the remainder are taught by Frankfurt professors. Most of the teaching will be conducted in Frankfurt, but students will also spend two weeks at Duke and practice distance learning via the Internet.
Daniel Nagy, Fuqua’s associate dean for admissions and recruiting, said Fuqua created the program to “help us a lot with our brand and our image” in Europe and attract high-quality international students. Frankfurt was selected as the site for the new program because of the resources available at the local university and in the city itself.
“Frankfurt is really becoming the financial hub of Europe,” Nagy said. “There are huge, major financial institutions, some massive banks that are in Frankfurt. We thought it would be easier to get corporate sponsorship having them in our backyard.”
In addition to corporate sponsors, students in the program must have a minimum of three years of work experience. Company sponsors of students in the inaugural class include Deutsche Bank and GlaxoSmithKline. Seventy-three percent of the class hails from Germany. The remaining students are from the United States, China, France, Switzerland, Slovakia, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Nagy said that while Fuqua is pleased by the caliber of the students, the program’s administrators hope to increase enrollment and draw more individuals from outside Germany in coming years. “We were somewhat limited this first year just because we got a late start on the recruiting,” he said. “We plan to do far more reaching [and] marketing next year, mostly in Europe.”
Graduates of the program will receive two separate degrees, one from Duke and one from Frankfurt. Under an initial contract, the program would have administered a single degree—what would have been the first of its kind offered by Duke. Citing concerns about the amount of quality control the University would be able to wield over the joint-degree program, the University opted in May 2004 to support a dual degree.
Under the dual-degree program, Duke plays a larger role in dictating instructional, course and degree standards than it would if the program administered a joint degree. Because they teach more classes, Nagy said, Fuqua faculty currently play a more “predominant role” in the program than their Frankfurt colleagues.
Administrative work and marketing efforts, he added, are more evenly split between the schools.
Fuqua began working with Frankfurt University in 2003 when Fuqua was forced to close its satellite campus based in Frankfurt because of problems related to overexpansion, enrollment and finances. Nagy said Fuqua learned from their “misstep” and plans on solidifying the MBA program in Frankfurt before collaborating with other schools.
Nagy said the Frankfurt program is “very transferrable.” If successful, it will serve as a model for similar programs in other countries. Nagy said schools in China, Russia, the Netherlands, South Korea and India have approached Fuqua about forming partnerships.
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