Located in Midtown Manhattan, Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business offers a world-class business education in the epicenter of the financial capital of the world. Poets&Quants places the school’s offering at a U.S. rank of 50thwhile The Financial Times ranks Gabelli 15th among the best U.S. Executive MBA programs. The Economist ranks Gabelli’s EMBA program #1 in Gender Balance among students, an honor the school is extremely proud of.
Francis Petit, Associate Dean of Global Initiatives and Partnerships, says the main attractions for students at Fordham are the one-weekend-a-month schedule and the close, collaborative ties students form with each other. “The overall takeaway is we do things throughout the program to make them bond more,” says Petit. “In the end when they graduate they really are very tight with their classmates. If Fordham is anything, Fordham is personable. So we try to create a different experience on the front end.”
Fordham attracts students from a broad range of industries, including finance, consulting, marketing, pharma, healthcare, utilities, nonprofits, transportation, and the military. “We are getting veterans who are coming from afar because they can come to New York one weekend a month and then they go back to where they are,” says Petit.
The 22-month-long program is delivered in a single three-day weekend per month, with students attending class from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. That schedule requires students to take off from work just one day a month. Also sprinkled throughout the program are the three residencies held on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday at a conference center in Westchester. At each of those residencies, students complete immersions in specific courses.
The program is consists of a core curriculum of ten courses that range from Business Policy to Transnational Management and Systems Operations. Students then complete a series of four concentration courses in management sciences that include Managing Innovation and Change and Personal Leadership Development. Rounding out the EMBA are two elective courses. Students can pick from a menu of five courses: Contemporary Ethical Issues in Business; Global Finance; International Communication Negotiations; International Field Study, and International Trade and Development. Throughout the program’s courses, the school puts an emphasis on experience-based, team-oriented projects.
In the past five years, Fordham has added a number of innovative global elective options for EMBA students that require a trip abroad. Students have traveled to Galway, Ireland, during the International Art Festival in July. Others had an opportunity to visit Spain to retrace the steps taken by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in a Jesuit History & Leadership Culture course. Over five days, students trek 20 kilometers per day in silence by foot and then gather for evening class sessions in what is essentially a leadership development exercise.
Each cohort also designs its own international capstone week abroad, with an in-depth, consulting-style business project and in-country lectures on the nation’s economy and business climate. Fordham lets EMBA students decide which country they’ll visit and study. Recent trips have been to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Johannesburg, South Africa, Bejing China, and Istanbul, Turkey. The global immersions also include some touristy downtime. When a cohort went to China to work with Ogilvy Public Relations on a project, for example, they also got to visit Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall.
Gabelli Executive MBA students have approximately 18 years of work experience, enter at an average age of 40, and boast incoming salaries of around $120,000 a year. Candidates are required to have a minimum of seven years of work history. Applications for the fall semester are due by May 27th, while applications for the spring semester are due by November 5th.
