Harvard Business School’s Online Courses & Programs

Harvard Business School: The campus few online students ever see

It’s now been five years since Harvard Business School rolled out its first online business program. Launched in the fall of 2014, the school’s Credential of Readiness (CORE) trio of online business basics courses first went live in June to only rising juniors and seniors and freshly minted college grads in Massachusetts.

From that initial foray into the online space, Harvard Business School now offers a dozen different online courses and programs. CORE remains its most popular program, taken by more than 22,000 students, including nearly a third of the last entering class of Harvard MBAs. The program which includes Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting now costs $2,250, up from an introductory price of $1,500, or $3,680 if a student wants to take the course for credit. Students can take CORe over either a ten-week timeframe, requiring a time weekly time commitment of about 15 hours, or a less intense 17-week period, requiring about eight hours of work a week.

Why take a Harvard Business School Online course? For one thing, it’s fairly inexpensive. The least expensive offering, Sustainable Business Strategy, costs just over $1,000 and takes only three weeks to complete. Most of the courses are available for about $1,600. For another, they are all taught by full-time, tenured and endowed professors at Harvard Business School who have taught in the core MBA program. And third, taking and completing a course allows you to put the most valuable brand name in business education on your resume.

Besides, applying to these programs is easy–nothing like the lengthy process to get into Harvard’s highly selective MBA program. And the acceptance rates are very high, particularly compared to the 11% admit rate for HBS’ full-time MBA.

Here’s our guide to the current HBS lineup of a dozen offerings:

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