At Utah Eccles, An Executive MBA That Feels Like Family – And Sells Itself On Hard Numbers

When Jeff Druck’s wife decided to surprise him at a family event for the University of Utah’s Executive MBA program a few weeks ago, she didn’t call him. She called the program staff.

The staff, in turn, quietly messaged Druck’s study team with one instruction: make sure Jeff doesn’t leave early.

“It was a great surprise, and it was that kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re part of a family,” says Druck, an emergency room physician who holds a faculty leadership role at the University of Utah.

‘I NEED THE EDUCATION’

That sense of being looked after comes up again and again when students in the David Eccles School of Business EMBA talk about the program. So do the relationships with classmates, a weeklong intensive at a ski resort, and a curriculum they say they can put to work on Monday morning.

The 21-month program, which meets two weekends a month, is also climbing in the rankings. In the Financial Times’ 2026 Global EMBA ranking, Eccles placed No. 84 worldwide, up 10 places in two years. Its alumni report average salaries of $201,787, a 45% increase from 2025, and 69% say they achieved their goals. It ties Georgia Tech for 17th among the 22 standalone U.S. programs in the ranking. The school’s open-enrollment executive education programs also jumped to No. 27 globally in this year’s FT ranking, up from No. 41, and No. 2 among U.S. public schools.

Druck grew up in Houston and went to high school, college, and medical school there before landing in Salt Lake City. Proximity mattered when he chose a program, he says, but it wasn’t the deciding factor. He looked at others, including Yale’s, and decided he wanted to learn in person.

“I could easily see myself phoning it in if I was doing some sort of online program,” he says.

What sealed it was talking to people who had been through the Utah program. At some big-name schools, he says, many students seem to be “in it just for the name.” At Utah, he heard something different.

“In my position, it’s not so much that I need the degree,” Druck says. “It’s that I need the education, and I think that’s really the focus here.”

Lisa Bowker, a Minnesota native who came to Utah about six years ago after stints in Texas and Colorado, already holds a master’s in higher education. When she moved from education into business, she wanted an MBA that would let her apply what she learned right away.

It has paid off. Bowker now leads her company’s people team, its HR function, and she credits the program for much of that.

“I’ve gotten promotions,” she says. “I don’t think it’s come in any small part from what I’ve been able to learn.”

For Justin Spangler, a Google sales rep since 2018 who now covers state and local government and higher education in Utah, the problem wasn’t a career stall. He had climbed Google’s sales hierarchy – startups, enterprise, key accounts and now the public sector – but felt he knew only one part of business.

“I knew how to do my job really, really well,” he says. “I wasn’t learning anything.”

Spangler had long assumed he would go to a top full-time MBA program. Family circumstances made keeping his job and its benefits a priority, and the EMBA let him do that. “It fit all of the things that I need in my life,” he says.

A WEEKEND IN THE LIFE

On class weekends, students are on campus Friday and Saturday. Breakfast opens at 7:30 a.m. One course runs from 8:30 a.m. to noon, and after a catered lunch, a second runs from 1 to 4:30 p.m. Courses rotate every few sessions.

About once a month there’s a social event – a trivia night, say, or the family gathering where Druck got his surprise. Lunch-and-learn sessions bring in executives. On the day P&Q visited, the speaker was the CEO of BioFire Defense.

Much of the work happens in study teams, which students say become unusually close. Druck’s team holds a standing weekly check-in, even when there’s nothing on the agenda. Bowker’s team, based in Utah County, meets every Wednesday in person, alternating between members’ offices.

The surprise for most students isn’t the workload, though there’s plenty of it. Spangler says there was more reading than he expected, and that accounting “was harder than I remember from undergraduate.”

The bigger surprise, Bowker says, is how much she still looks forward to coming to campus a year and a half in.

“I thought at some point I’d be like, ‘Okay, just another weekend,’” she says. “But truly, I get up and I’m excited to come. I’m excited to learn.”

SNOWBIRD, MEXICO – AND A SECRET

The program opens with a week at Snowbird, the ski resort in the Wasatch Mountains – before the snow arrives. Students take two courses there, Team Building and Ethics, and families stay home.

“They mean it literally, 8 to 10,” Spangler says of the schedule. “I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ But it is truly 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.”

The intensive, Bowker says, is where teams bond and students first get to know the rest of the cohort.

The program has three intensive weeks in all: Snowbird, a North America trip, and an international trip. Where the class would go on its international trip was the program’s most closely guarded secret. Students say they had tried at least 100 excuses to find out. Over breakfast on a recent October Friday, Spangler pressed Vierig again. Vierig insisted he had no idea.

“It’s in the vault,” a classmate said.

It didn’t stay there long. About 30 minutes later, with the full class gathered, Vierig took the floor for a presentation that drew laughs and a rising sense of expectation. Then he cued up a video.

After much teasing – including claiming the class would be taking their big trip to Grantsville, Utah – the destination flashed on the screen: Japan.

The room erupted in applause. For a class that started as strangers at a mountain resort, it was a moment that showed how far they’d come together – and how much they were looking forward to one last trip as a group.

THE DEAN WHO CAME TO LEARN – AND STAYED

Vierig, associate dean for graduate programs and executive education, knows the student experience firsthand. He’s a graduate of the program.

He came to it reluctantly. He was a senior vice president of finance at American Stores, the Salt Lake City grocery and drug company, with 200 employees reporting to him. Founder Sam Skaggs wanted his entire leadership team to hold MBAs, partly to make sure they understood valuation well enough to protect the company from being bought out cheaply.

So president Teresa Beck called Vierig into her office. “She said, ‘You need to get an MBA,’” he recalls. “I said, ‘What do I need an MBA for? I’ve got 200 employees. I’m a senior vice president.’”

Once he enrolled, Vierig – an Ernst & Young veteran with a decade there and eight years in his finance role – realized how much had changed. After graduating, he and the leadership team took a hard look at the threat of online retail and concluded the smart move was to sell. The company went to Albertsons.

Around then, the school called and asked whether he’d be interested in running one of its MBA programs. He expected to stay a year or two. That was 26 years ago.

Then-Dean Jack Brittain used to come by every year to ask whether Vierig would stick around another year. Eventually, Vierig says, the dean asked, “Do I need to come ask you anymore?”

“I said, ‘No, it’s in my blood,’” Vierig says. “It’s hard to find a job where you have a job and the mission.”

He still teaches corporate finance. The best part of the job, he says, is when a student comes back to say they used something from class to create shareholder value – and it rippled through their whole organization.

WHAT KEEPS HIM UP AT NIGHT

Asked what worries him, Vierig answers quickly: future enrollment.

He points to the federal elimination of Grad PLUS loans and what he calls the national tone toward higher education. His fear is that misinformation about the value of a degree will take hold.

“It can’t be repossessed. It can’t be taken away,” he says. “It’s your asset for the rest of your life.”

International enrollment is the sharpest pain point. One of the school’s graduate programs, he says, was 70% international two to three years ago and is now about 20%. Students are admitted, Vierig says, but embassies cancel interviews or decline visas, and they never arrive.

“They’re smart, they’re articulate. They’re amazing students,” he says. “Some stay on to be faculty.”

THE ROI PITCH

Vierig’s answer is to lead with hard numbers. For the full-time MBA, that’s 92% placement. For working professionals – which describes most of the school’s graduate students – it’s salary growth.

In specialized master’s programs, placement is the story. Utah’s accounting master’s programs report 100% placement, he says, in jobs paying $15,000 to $20,000 more than graduates would earn with just an undergraduate degree. The school has spent the past two years recruiting undergraduates from across campus – including those in fields where jobs are scarce – into its specialized master’s programs, backed by heavy investment in career coaching.

“All it takes is somebody getting a really good job that’s $10,000 to $20,000 more than they would have with an undergraduate degree,” Vierig says. “The ROI is one to two years.”

When the school talks to prospective students, it shows survey numbers by class, he says, and makes a simple pitch: show up, do the work and invest in the network, and here’s the return to expect.

“We’ve really had to push that more the last few years than we did before,” he says.

For Druck, the return is already clear. “You really feel like you’re getting the education that you’re paying for,” he says.

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